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Books by Lady Gregory 



Translations of Irish Epics t CUCHULAIN OF MUIRTHEMNE 

GODS AND FIGHTING MEN 
SAINTS AND WONDERS 

Translations and Folk Lorei 

POETS AND DREAMERS 
THE KILTARTAN HISTORY 

BOOK 
THE KILTARTAN WONDER 

BOOK 

Dramatic Works t SEVEN SHORT PLAYS 

THE IMAGE 

THE KILTARTAN MOLIERE 
IRISH FOLK-HISTORY PLAYS 




From a painting by 
Gerald F. Kelly 



r^H\ 




^^^oXi 



/d gfritaisq b m 



New Comedies 



By 

Lady Gregory 



The Bogie Men— The Full Moon— Coats 

Darner's Gold— McDonough's 

Wife 



G. P. Putnam's Sons 

New York and London 
Gbe IKntcfcerbocfeer press 

1913 






VJT ° 



Copyright 19 13 

BY 

LADY GREGORY 

These plays have heen copyrighted and published simultaneously in the 
United States and Great Britain. 

All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages. 

All acting rights, both professional and amateur, are reserved, in the United 
States, Great Britain, and all countries of the Copyright Union, by the author. 
Performances forbidden and right of representation reserved. 

Application for the right of performing these plays or reading them in public 
should be made to Samuel French, 28 West 38th Street, New York City, or 26 
Southampton Street, Strand, London. 



Ube ImCclictbocfcer ptcw, Hew fiort 

OCI.A332868 



ro 



W 



TO THE RT. HON. W. F. BAILEY 
COUNSELLOR, PEACEMAKER, FRIEND 



ABBEY THEATRE, I913. 



CONTENTS 




The Bogie Men . 


PAGE 
I 


The Full Moon . 


• 25 


Coats 


• 65 


Damer's Gold 


• 89 


McDonough's Wife . 


• 133 


Notes 


• 155 



THE BOGIE MEN 



Persons 

Taig O'Harragha j . . . both chimney 
Darby Melody I . . . sweeps 



THE BOGIE MEN 

Scene: A Shed near where a coach stops. Darby 
comes in. Has a tin can of water in one 
hand, a sweep's bag and brush in the other. 
He lays down bag on an empty box and puts 
can on the floor. Is taking a showy suit of 
clothes out of bag and admiring them and 
is about to put them on when he hears some 
one coming and hurriedly puts them back 
into the bag. 

Taig: {At door.) God save all here! 

Darby: God save you. A sweep is it? (Sus- 
piciously.) What brought you following me? 

Taig: Why would n't I be a sweep as good as 
yourself? 

Darby: It is not one of my own trade I came 
looking to meet with. It is a shelter I was search- 
ing out, where I could put on a decent appearance, 
rinsing my head and my features in a tin can of 
water. 

Taig: Is it long till the coach will be passing 
by the cross-road beyond? 

Darby: Within about a half an hour they were 
telling me. 

a 



4 The Bogie Men 

Taig: There does be much people travelling 
to this place? 

Darby: I suppose there might, and it being the 
high road from the town of Ennis. 

Taig: It should be in this town you follow 
your trade? 

Darby: It is not in the towns I do be. 

Taig: There 's nothing but the towns, since 
the farmers in the country clear out their own 
chimneys with a bush under and a bush overhead. 

Darby: I travel only gentlemen's houses. 

Taig: There does be more of company in the 
streets than you 'd find on the bare road. 

Darby: It is n't easy get company for a person 
has but two empty hands. 

Taig: Wealth to be in the family it is all one 
nearly with having a grip of it in your own palm. 

Darby: I wish to the Lord it was the one thing. 

Taig: You to know what I know 

Darby: What is it that you know? 

Taig: It is dealing out cards through the 
night time I will be from this out, and making bets 
on racehorses and fighting-cocks through all the 
hours of the day. 

Darby: I would sooner to be sleeping in feathers 
and to do no hand's turn at all, day or night. 

Taig: If I came paddling along through every 
place this day and the road hard under my feet, 
it is likely I will have my choice way leaving it. 



The Bogie Men 5 

Darby: How is that now? 

Taig: A horse maybe and a car or two horses, 
or maybe to go in the coach, and I myself sitting 
alongside the man came in it. 

Darby: Is it that he is taking you into his 
service? 

Taig: Not at all! And I being of his own 
family and his blood. 

Darby: Of his blood now? 

Taig: A relation I have, that is full up of 
money and of every whole thing. 

Darby: A relation? 

Taig: A first cousin, by the side of the mother. 

Darby: Well, I am not without having a first 
cousin of my own. 

Taig: I would n't think he 'd be much. To 
be listening to my mother giving out a report of 
my one's ways, you would maybe believe it is no 
empty skin of a man he is. 

Darby: My own mother was not without giv- 
ing out a report of my man's ways. 

Taig: Did she see him? 

Darby: She did, I suppose, or the thing 
was near him. She never was tired talking of 
him. 

Taig: It is often my own mother would have 
Dermot pictured to myself. 

Darby: It is often the likeness of Timothy was 
laid down to me by the teaching of my mother's 



6 The Bogie Men 

mouth, since I was able to walk the floor. She 
thought the whole world of him. 

Taig: A bright scholar she laid Dermot down 
to be. A good doing fellow for himself. A man 
would be well able to go up to his promise. 

Darby: That is the same account used to be 
given out of Timothy. 

Taig: To some trade of merchandise it is 
likely Dermot was reared. A good living man 
that was never any cost on his mother. 

Darby: To own an estate before he would go 
far in age Timothy was on the road. 

Taig: To have the handling of silks and 
jewelleries and to be free of them, and of suits 
and the making of suits, that is the way with the 
big merchants of the world. 

Darby: It is letting out his land to grass 
farmers a man owning acres does be making his 
profit. 

Taig: A queer thing you to be the way you 
are, and he to be an upstanding gentleman. 

Darby: It is the way I went down ; my mother 
used to be faulting me and I not being the equal 
of him. Tormenting and picking at me and 
shouting me on the road. ' ' You thraneen, ' ' she 'd 
say, "you little trifle of a son! You stumbling 
over the threshold as if in slumber, and Timothy 
being as swift as a bee!" 

Taig: So my own mother used to be going on 



The Bogie Men 7 

at myself, and be letting out shrieks and screeches. 
"What now would your cousin Dermot be 
saying?" every time there would come a new 
rent in my rags. 

Darby: " Little he *d think of you, " she 'd say; 
"you without body and puny, not fit to lift scraws 
from off the field, and Timothy bringing in profit 
to his mother's hand, and earning prizes and 
rewards." 

Taig: The time it would fail me to follow my 
book or to say off my A,B, ab, to draw Dermot 
down on me she would. "Before he was up to 
your age," she would lay down, "he was fitted to 
say off Catechisms and to read newses. You have 
no more intellect beside him, " she 'd say, "than a 
chicken has its head yet in the shell." 

Darby: "Let you hold up the same as Timothy, " 
she 'd give out, and I to stoop my shoulders the 
time the sun would prey upon my head. "He 
that is as straight and as clean as a green rush on 
the brink of the bog." 

Taig: "It is you will be fit but to blow the 
bellows," my mother would say, "the time 
Dermot will be forging gold." I let on the book 
to have gone astray on me at the last. Why 
would I go crush and bruise myself under a weight 
of learning, and there being one in the family well 
able to take my cost and my support whatever 
way it might go? Dermot that would feel my 



8 The Bogie Men 

keep no more than the lake would feel the weight 
of the duck. 

Darby: I seen no use to be going sweating after 
farmers, striving to plough or to scatter seed, when 
I never could come anear Timothy in any sort of 
a way, and he, by what she was saying, able to 
thrash out a rick of oats in the day. So it fell out 
I was thrown on the ways of the world, having no 
skill in any trade, till there came a demand for me 
going aloft in chimneys, I being as thin as a needle 
and shrunken with weakness and want of food. 

Taig: I got my living for a while by miracle 
and trafficking in rabbit skins, till a sweep from 
Limerick bound me to himself one time I was 
skinned with the winter. Great cruelty he gave 
me till I ran from him with the brush and the bag, 
and went foraging around for myself. 

Darby: So am I going around by myself. I 
never had a comrade lad. 

Taig: My mother that would hit me a crack if 
I made free with any of the chaps of the village, 
saying that would not serve me with Dermot, that 
had a good top-coat and was brought up to manners 
and behaviour. 

Darby: My own mother that drew down 
Timothy on me the time she 'd catch me going 
with the lads that had their pleasure out of the 
world, slashing tops and pebbles, throwing and 
going on with games. 



The Bogie Men 9 

Taig: I took my own way after, fitting myself 
for sports and funning, against the time the rich 
man would stretch out his hand. Going with 
wild lads and poachers I was, till they left me 
carrying their snares in under my coat, that I 
was lodged for three months in the gaol. 

Darby: The neighbours had it against me 
after, I not being friendly when we were small. 
The most time I am going the road it is a lonesome 
shadow I cast before me. 

Taig: {Looking oat of the door.) It is on this 
day I will be making acquaintance with himself. 
My mother that sent him a request to come meet 
me in this town on this day, it being the first of 
the summer. 

Darby: My own mother that did no less, 
telling me she got word from Timothy he would 
come meet here with myself. It is certain he will 
bring me into his house, she having wedded 
secondly with a labouring man has j>ot a job at 
Golden Hill in Lancashire. I would not recognise 
him beyond any other one. 

Taig: I would recognise the signs of a big man. 
I wish I was within in his kitchen. There is a 
pinch of hunger within in my heart. 

Darby: So there is within in myself. 

Taig: Is there nothing at all in the bag? 

Darby: It is a bit of a salted herring. 

Taig: Why would n't you use it? 



io The Bogie Men 

Darby: I would be delicate coming before him 
and the smell of it to be on me, and all the grand 
meats will be at his table. 

Taig: {Showing a bottle.) The full of a pint 
I have of porter, that fell from a tinker's car. 

Darby: I wonder you would not swallow it 
down for to keep courage in your mind. 

Taig: It is what I am thinking, I to take it 
fasting, it might put confusion and wildness in my 
head. I would wish, and I meeting with him, my 
wits to be of the one clearness with his own. It 
is not long to be waiting; it is in claret I will be 
quenching my thirst to-night, or in punch ! 

Darby: {Looking out.) I am nearly in dread 
meeting Timothy, fearing I will not be pleasing 
to him, and I not acquainted with his habits. 

Taig: I would not be afeard, and Dermot to 
come sparkling in, and seven horses in his coach. 

Darby: What way can I come before him at 
all? I would be better pleased you to personate 
me and to stand up to him in my place. 

Taig: Any person to put orders on me, or to 
bid me change my habits, I *d give no heed ! I 'd 
stand up to him in the spite of his teeth ! 

Darby: If it was n't for the hearthfires to be 
slackened with the springtime, and my work to be 
lessened with the strengthening of the sun, I *d 
sooner not see him till another moon is passed, or 
two moons. 



The Bogie Men n 

Taig: He to bid me read out the news of the 
world, taking me to be a scholar, I 'd give him 
words that are in no books ! I'd give him newses ! 
I 'd knock rights out of him or any one I ever 
seen. 

Darby: I could speak only of my trade. The 
boundaries of the world to be between us, I 'm 
thinking I 'd never ask to go cross them at all. 

Taig: He to go into Court swearing witnesses 
and to bring me along with him to face the judges 
and the whole troop of the police, I 'd go bail I '11 
be no way daunted or scared. 

Darby: What way can I keep company with 
him? I that was partly reared in the workhouse. 
And he having a star on his hat and a golden apple 
in his hand. He will maybe be bidding me to 
scour myself with soapy water all the Sundays 
and Holy days of the year ! I tell you I am getting 
low hearted. I pray to the Lord to forgive me 
where I did not go under the schoolmaster's rod ! 

Taig: I that will shape crampy words the same 
as any scholar at all! I'll let on to be a master of 
learning and of Latin ! 

Darby: Ah, what letting on? It is Timothy 
will look through me the same as if my eyes were 
windows, and my thoughts standing as plain as 
cattle under the risen sun ! It is easier letting on 
to have knowledge than to put on manners and 
behaviour. 



12 The Bogie Men 

Taig: Ah, what 's manners but to refuse no 
man a share of your bite and to keep back your 
hand from throwing stones? 

Darby: I tell you I 'm in shivers ! My heart 
that is shaking like an ivy leaf! My bones that 
are loosened and slackened in the similitude of a 
rope of tow! I 'd sooner meet with a lion of the 
wilderness or the wickedest wind of the hills! I 
thought it never would come to pass. I 'd sooner 
go into the pettiest house, the wildest home and 
the worst ! Look at here now. Let me stop along 
with yourself. I never let out so much of my 
heart to any one at all till this day. It *s a pity 
we should be parted ! 

Taig: Is it to come following after me you 
would, before the face of Dermot? 

Darby: I 'd feel no dread and you being at my 
side. 

Taig: Dermot to see me in company with the 
like of you ! I would n't for the whole world he 
should be aware I had ever any traffic with 
chimneys or with soot. It would not be for his 
honour you to draw anear him! 

Darby: {Indignantly.) No but Timothy that 
would make objection to yourself ! He that would 
whip the world for manners and behaviour ! 

Taig: Dermot that is better again. He that 
would write and dictate to you at the one 
time! 



The Bogie Men 13 

Darby: What is that beside owning tillage, and 
to need no education, but to take rents into your 
hand? 

Taig: I would never believe him to own an 
estate. 

Darby: Why wouldn't he own it? "The 
biggest thing and the grandest," my mother 
would say when I would ask her what was he 
doing. 

Taig: Ah, what could be before selling out 
silks and satins. There is many an estated lord 
could n't reach you out a fourpenny bit. 

Darby: The grandest house around the seas 
of Ireland he should have, beautifully made up! 
You would nearly go astray in it! It would n't 
be known what you could make of it at all ! You 
would n't have it walked in a month ! 

Taig: What is that beside having a range of 
shops as wide maybe as the street beyond? 

Darby: A house would be the capital of the 
county ! One door for the rich, one door for the 
common ! Velvet carpets rolled up, the way there 
would no dust from the chimney fall upon them. 
A hundred would n't be many standing in a corner 
of that place! A high bed of feathers, curled hair 
mattresses. A cover laid on it would be flowery 
with blossoms of gold ! 

Taig: Muslin and gauze, cambric and linen! 
Canton crossbar! Glass windows full up of 



14 The Bogie Men 

ribbons as gaudy as the crooked bow in the sky! 
Sovereigns and shillings in and out as plenty as to 
riddle rape seed. Sure them that do be selling in 
shops die leaving millions. 

Darby: Your man is not so good as mine in his 
office or in his billet. 

Taig: There is the horn of the coach. Get out 
now till I '11 prepare myself. He might chance to 
come seeking for me here. 

Darby: There *s a lather of sweat on myself. 
That *s my tin can of water! 

Taig: {Holding can from him.) Get out I tell 
you! I would n't wish him to feel the smell of 
you on the breeze. 

Darby: {Almost crying.) You are a mean 
savage to go keeping from me my tin can and my 
rag! 

Taig: Go wash yourself at the pump can't you ? 

Darby: That we may never be within the same 
four walls again, or come under the lintel of the 
one door! {He goes out.) 

Taig: {Calling after him while he takes a suit 
of clothes from his bag.) I 'm not like yourself ! I 
have good clothes to put on me, what you have n't 
got ! A body- coat my mother made out — she lost 
up to three shillings on it, — and a hat — and a 
speckled blue cravat. {He hastily throws off his 
sweep* s smock and cap, and puts on clothes. As he 
does he sings:) 



The Bogie Men 15 

All round my hat I wore a green ribbon, 
All round my hat for a year and a day; 
And if any one asks me the reason I wore it 
I '11 say that my true love went over the sea! 

All in my hat I will stick a blue feather 
The same as the birds do be up in the tree; 
And if you would ask me the reason I do it 
I '11 tell you my true love is come back to me! 

(He washes his face and wipes it, looking at him- 
self in the tin can. He catches sight of a straw hat 
passing window.) Who is that? A gentleman? 
(He draws back.) 

(Darby comes in. He has changed his 
clothes and wears a straw hat and light 
coat and trousers. He is looking for a 
necktie which he had dropped and picks 
up. His back is turned to Taig who is 
standing at the other door.) 
Taig: (Awed.) It cannot be that you are 
Dermot Melody? 

Darby: My father's name was Melody sure 
enough, till he lost his life in the year of the black 
potatoes. 

Taig: It is yourself I am come here purposely 
to meet with. 

Darby: You should be my mother's sister's son 
so, Timothy O'Harragha. 



16 The Bogie Men 

Taig: {Sheepishly.) I am that. I am sorry 
indeed it failed me to be out before you in the 
street. 

Darby: Oh, I would n't be looking for that 
much from you. {They are trying to keep their 
backs to each other, and to rub their faces cleaner.) 

Taig: I would n't wish to be anyway trouble- 
some to you. I am badly worthy of you. 

Darby: It is in dread I am of being troublesome 
to yourself. 

Taig: Oh, it would be hard for you to be that. 
Nothing you could put on me would be any hard- 
ship at all, if it was to walk steel thistles. 

Darby: You have a willing heart surely. 

Taig: Any little job at all I could do for 
you 

Darby: All I would ask of you is to give me 
my nourishment and my bite. 

Taig: I will do that. I will be your serving 
man. 

Darby: Ah, you are going too far in that. 

Taig: It 's my born duty to do that much. 
I '11 bring your dinner before you, if I can be any- 
way pleasing to you; you that is used to wealthy 
people. 

Darby: Indeed I was often in a house having 
up to twenty chimneys. 

Taig: You are a rare good man, nothing short 
of it, and you going as you did so high in the world. 



The Bogie Men 17 

Darby: Any person would go high before he 
would put his hand out through the top of a 
chimney. 

Taig: Having full and plenty of every good 
thing. 

Darby: I saw nothing so plentiful as soot. 
There is not the equal of it nourishing a garden. 
It would turn every crop blue, being so good. 

Taig: {Weeping.) It is a very unkind thing 
to go drawing chimneys down on me and soot, 
and you having all that ever was ! 

Darby: Little enough I have or ever had. 

Taig: To be casting up my trade against me, 
I being poor and hungry, and you having 
coins and tokens from all the goldpits of the 
world. 

Darby: I wish I ever handled a coin of gold 
in my lifetime. 

Taig: To speak despisingly, not pitiful. And 
I thinking the chimney sweeping would be forgot 
and not reproached to me, if you have handled the 
fooleries and watches of the world, that you don't 
know the end of your riches ! 

Darby: I am maybe getting your meaning 
wrong, your tongue being a little hard and sharp 
because you are Englified, but I am without new 
learnments and so I speak flat. 

Taig: You to have the millions of King Solo- 
mon, you have no right to be putting reflections 



1 8 The Bogie Men 

on me! I would never behave that way, and 
housefuls to fall into my hand. 

Darby: You are striving to put ridicule on me 
and to make a fool of me. That is a very un- 
seemly thing to do ! I that did not ask to go hide 
the bag or the brush. 

Taig: There you are going on again. Is it to 
the customers in your shops you will be giving 
out that it was my lot to go through the world as a 
sweep? 

Darby: Customers and shops ! Will you stop 
your funning? Let you quit mocking and making 
a sport of me ! That is very bad acting behaviour. 

Taig: Striving to blacken my face again at 
the time I had it washed pure white. You surely 
have a heart of marble. 

Darby: What way at all can you be putting 
such a rascally say out of your mouth? I '11 take 
no more talk from you, I to be twenty-two degrees 
lower than the Hottentots ! 

Taig: If you are my full cousin Dermot Melody 
I '11 make you quit talking of soot ! 

Darby: I '11 take no more talk from yourself! 

Taig: Have a care now! 

Darby: Have a care yourself! 

{Each gives the other a push. They stumble 
and fall, sitting facing one another. 
Darby's hat falls off.) 

Taig: Is it you it is? 



The Bogie Men 19 

Darby: Who else would it be? 

Taig: What call had you letting on to be 
Dermot Melody? 

Darby: What letting on? Dermot is my full 
name, but Darby is the name I am called. 

Taig: Are you a man owning riches and shops 
and merchandise? 

Darby: I am not, or anything of the sort. 

Taig: Have you teems of money in the bank? 

Darby: If I had would I be sitting on this 
floor? 

Taig: You thief you ! 

Darby: Thief yourself! Turn around now till 
I will measure your features and your face. 
Yourself is it! Is it personating my cousin 
Timothy you are? 

Taig: I am personating no one but myself. 

Darby: You letting on to be an estated magis- 
trate and my own cousin and such a great genera- 
tion of a man. And you not owning so much as 
a rood of ridges ! 

Taig: Covering yourself with choice clothing 
for to deceive me and to lead me astray ! 

Darby: Putting on your head a fine glossy hat 
and I thinking you to have come with the spring- 
tide, the way you had luck through your life ! 

Taig: Letting on to be Dermot Melody ! You 
that are but the cull and the weakling of a race! 
It is a queer game you played on me and a crooked 



20 The Bogie Men 

game. I never would have brought my legs so far 
to meet with the sooty likes of you ! 

Darby: Letting on to be my poor Timothy 
O'Harragha! 

Taig: I never was called but Taig. Timothy 
was a sort of a Holy day name. 

Darby: Where now are our two cousins? Or 
is it that the both of us are cracked? 

Taig: It is, or our mothers before us. 

Darby: My mother was a McGarrity woman 
from Loughrea. It is Mary was her Christened 
name. 

Taig: So was my own mother of the McGar- 
rity s. It is sisters they were sure enough. 

Darby: That makes us out to be full cousins 
in the heel. 

Taig: You no better than myself! And the 
prayers I used to be saying for you, and you but 
a sketch and an excuse of a man ! 

Darby: Ah, I am thinking people put more in 
their prayers than was ever put in them by God. 

Taig: Our mothers picturing us to one another 
as if we were the best in the world. 

Darby: Lies I suppose they were drawing down, 
for to startle us into good behaviour. 

Taig: Would n't you say now mothers to be a 
terror? 

Darby: And we nothing at all after but two 
chimney sweepers and two harmless drifty lads. 



The Bogie Men 21 

Taig: Where is the great quality dinner your- 
self was to give me, having seven sorts of dressed 
meat? Pullets and bacon I was looking for, and 
to fall on an easy life. 

Darby: Gone like the clouds of the winter's fog. 
We rose out of it the same as we went in. 

Taig: We have nothing to do but to starve 
with the hunger, and you being as bare as myself. 

Darby: We are in a bad shift surely. We 
must perish with the want of support. It is one 
of the tricks of the world does be played upon the 
children of Adam. 

Taig: All we have to do is to crawl to the poor- 
house gate. Or to go dig a pit in the graveyard, 
as it is short till we '11 be stretched there with the 
want of food. 

Darby: Food is it? There is nothing at this 
time against me eating my bit of a herring. 
{Seizes it and takes a bite.) 

Taig: Give me a divide of it. 

Darby: Give me a drop of your own porter so, 
is in the bottle. There need be no dread on you 
now, of you being no match for your grand man. 

Taig: That is so. (Drinks.) I '11 strive no 
more to fit myself for high quality relations. I am 
free from patterns of high up cousins from this 
out. I '11 be a pattern to myself. 

Darby: I am well content being free of you, 
the way you were pictured to be. I declare to 



22 The Bogie Men 

my goodness, the name of you put terror on me 
through the whole of my lifetime, and your image 
to be clogging and checking me on every side. 

Taig: To be thinking of you being in the world 
was a holy terror to myself. I give you my word 
you came through my sleep the same as a scarecrow 
or a dragon. 

Darby: It is great things I will be doing from 
this out, we two having nothing to cast up against 
one another. To be quit of Timothy the bogie 
and to get Taig for a comrade, I'mas proud as 
the Crown of France ! 

Taig: I *m in dread of neither bumble or bag- 
man or bugaboo! I will regulate things from 
myself from this out. 

Darby: There to be fineness of living in the 
world, why would n't I make it out for myself? 

Taig: It is to the harbours of America we will 
work our way across the wideness of the sea. It is 
well able we should be to go mounting up aloft 
in ropes. Come on Darby out of this ! 

Darby: There is magic and mastery come into 
me ! This day has put wings to my heart ! 

Taig: Be easy now. We are maybe not clear 
of the chimneys yet. 

Darby: What signifies chimneys? We '11 go 
up in them till we '11 take a view of the Seven Stars ! 
It is out beyond the hills of Burren I will cast my 
eye, till I '11 see the three gates of Heaven! 



The Bogie Men 23 

Taig: It *s like enough, luck will flow to you. 
The way most people fail is in not keeping up the 
heart. Faith, it 's well you have myself to mind 
you. Gather up now your brush and your bag. 

{They go to the door holding each other's hands 
and singing: "All in my hat I will 
cock a blue feather," etc.) 

Curtain 



THE FULL MOON 



TO ALL SANE PEOPLE IN OR OUT OF CLOON 
WHO KNOW THEIR NEIGHBOURS TO BE 
NATURALLY CRACKED OR SOMEWAY QUEER 
OR TO HAVE GONE WRONG IN THE HEAD. 



25 



Persons 
Shawn Early 
Bartley Fallon 
Peter Tannian 
Hyacinth Halvey 
Mrs. Broderick 
Miss Joyce 
Cracked Mary 
Davideen, her brother, an innocent 



► ALL SANE 



26 



THE FULL MOON 

Scene: A shed close to Cloon Station; Bartley 
Fallon is sitting gloomily on a box; Hyacinth 
Halvey and Shawn Early are coming in at 
door. 

Shawn Early: It is likely the train will not be 
up to its time, and cattle being on it for the fair. 
It 's best wait in the shed. Is that Bartley 
Fallon? What way are you, Bartley? 

Bartley Fallon: Faith, no way at all. On the 
drag, on the drag; striving to put the bad times 
over me. 

Shawn Early: Is it business with the nine 
o'clock you have? 

Bartley Fallon: The wife that is gone visiting 
to Tubber, and that has the door locked till such 
time as she will come back on the train. And I 
thought this shed a place where no bad thing 
would be apt to happen me, and not to be going 
through the streets, and the darkness falling. 

Shawn Early: It is not long till the full moon 
will be rising. 

Bartley Fallon: Everything that is bad, the 

falling sickness — God save the mark — or the like, 

27 



28 The Full Moon 

should be at its worst at the full moon. I suppose 
because it is the leader of the stars. 

Shawn Early: Ah, what could happen any 
person in the street of Cloon? 

Bar thy Fallon: There might. Look at Matt 
Finn, the coffin-maker, put his hand on a cage the 
circus brought, and the lion took and tore it till 
they stuck him with a fork you 'd rise dung with, 
and at that he let it drop. And that was a man 
had never quitted Cloon. 

Shawn Early: I thought you might be sending 
something to the fair. 

Bartley Fallon: It is n't to the train I would be 
trusting anything I would have to sell, where it 
might be thrown off the track. And where would 
be the use sending the couple of little lambs I 
have? It is likely there is no one would ask me 
where was I going. When the weight is not in 
them, they won't carry the price. Sure, the grass 
I have is no good, but seven times worse than the 
road. 

Shawn Early: They are saying there '11 be 
good demand at the fair of Carrow to-morrow. 

Hyacinth Halvey: To-morrow the fair day of 
Carrow? I was not remembering that. 

Bartley Fallon: Ah, there won't be many in it, 
I 'm thinking. There is n't a hungrier village in 
Connacht, they were telling me, and it 9 s poor the 
look of it as well. 



The Full Moon 29 

Hyacinth Halvey: To-morrow the fair day. 
There will be all sorts in the streets to-night. 

Bartley Fallon: The sort that will be in it will 
be a bad sort — sievemakers and tramps and 
neuks. 

Hyacinth Halvey: The tents on the fair green ; 
there will be music in it ; there was a fiddler having 
no legs would set men of threescore years and of 
fourscore years dancing. I can nearly hear his 
tune. {He whistles " The Heather Broom. ") 

Bartley Fallon: You are apt to be going there 
on the train, I suppose? It is well to be you, Mr. 
Halvey, having a good place in the town, and the 
price of your fare, and maybe six times the price 
of it, in your pocket. 

Hyacinth Halvey: I did n't think of that. I 
wonder could I go — for one night only — and see 
what the lads are doing. 

Shawn Early: Are you forgetting, Mr. Halvey, 
that you are to meet his Reverence on the platform 
that is coming home from drinking water at the 
Spa? 

Hyacinth Halvey: So I can meet him, and get 
in the train after him getting out. 

(Mrs. Broderick and Peter Tannian come 
in.) 

Mrs. Broderick: Is that Mr. Halvey is in it? 
I was looking for you at the chapel as I passed, 
and the Angelus bell after ringing. 



30 The Full Moon 

Hyacinth Halvey: Business I have here, ma'am. 
I was in dread I might not be here before the train. 

Mrs. Broderick: So you might not, indeed. 
That nine o'clock train you can never trust it to 
be late. 

Hyacinth Halvey: To meet Father Gregan I 
am come, and maybe to go on myself. 

Mrs. Broderick: Sure, I knew well you would 
be in haste to be before Father Gregan, and we 
knowing what we know. 

Hyacinth Halvey: I have no business only to 
be showing respect to him. 

Shawn Early: His good word he will give to 
Mr. Halvey at the Board, where it is likely he 
will be made Clerk of the Union next week. 

Mrs. Broderick: His good word he will give to 
another thing besides that, I am thinking. 

Hyacinth Halvey: I don't know what you are 
talking about. 

Mrs. Broderick: Did n't you hear the news, 
Peter Tannian, that Mr. Halvey is apt to be 
linked and joined in marriage with Miss Joyce, 
the priest's housekeeper? 

Peter Tannian: I to believe all the lies I 'd 
hear, I 'd be a racked man by this. 

Mrs. Broderick: What I say now is as true as 
if you were on the other side of me. I suppose now 
the priest is come home there '11 be no delay 
getting the license. 



The Full Moon 31 

Hyacinth Halvey: It is not so settled as that. 

Mrs. Broderick: Why wouldn't it be settled 
and it being told at Mrs. Delane's and through 
the whole world? 

Peter Tannian: She should be a steady wife 
for him — a fortied girl. 

Shawn Early: A very good fortune in the bank 
they are saying she has, and she having crossed 
the ocean twice to America. 

Bartley Fallon: It 's as good for him to have a 
woman will keep the door open before him and 
his victuals ready and a quiet tongue in her head. 
Not like that little Tartar of my own. 

Mrs! Broderick. And an educated woman along 
with that. A man of his sort, going to be Clerk 
of the Union and to be taken up with books and 
papers, it 's likely he 'd die in a week, he to marry 
a dunce. 

Bartley Fallon: So it 's likely he would. 

Mrs. Broderick: A little shop they are saying 
she will take, for to open a flour store, and you to 
be keeping the accounts, the way you would not 
spend any waste time. 

Hyacinth Halvey: I have no mind to be settling 
myself down yet a while. I might maybe take 
a ramble here or there. There 's many of my 
comrades in the States. 

Mrs. Broderick: To go away from Cloon, is it? 
And why would you think to do that, and the 



32 The Full Moon 

whole town the same as a father and mother to 
you? Sure, the sergeant would live and die with 
you, and there are no two from this to Galway as 
great as yourself and the priest. To see you 
coming up the street, and your Dublin top-coat 
around you, there are some would give you a 
salute the same nearly as the Bishop. 

Peter Tannian: They would n't do that maybe 
and they hearing things as I heard them. 

Hyacinth Halvey: What things? 

Peter Tannian: There was a herd passing 
through from Carrow. It is what I heard him 
saying 

Mrs. Broderick: You heard nothing of Mr. 
Halvey, but what is worthy of him. But that 's 
the way always. The most thing a man does, the 
less he will get for it after. 

Peter Tannian: A grand place in Carrow I 
suppose you had? 

Hyacinth Halvey: I had plenty of places. Giv- 
ing out proclamations — attending waterworks 

Mrs. Broderick: It is well fitted for any place 
he is, and all that was written around him and he 
coming into Cloon. 

Peter Tannian: Writing is easy. 

Mrs. Broderick: Look at him since he was here, 
this twelvemonth back, that he never went into 
a dance-house or stood at a cross-road, and never 
lost a half-an-hour with drink. Made no blunder, 



The Full Moon 33 

made no rumours. Whatever could be said of 
his worth, it could not be too well said. 

Hyacinth Halvey: Do you think now, ma'am, 
would it be any harm I to go spend a day or 
maybe two days out of this — I to go on the 
train 

Miss Joyce: (At door, coming in backwards.) 
Go back now, go back! Don't be following after 
me in through the door! Is Mr. Halvey there? 
Don't let her come following me, Mr. Halvey ! 

Hyacinth Halvey: Who is it is in it? 

{Sound of discordant singing outside.) 

Miss Joyce: Cracked Mary it is, that is after 
coming back this day from the asylum. 

Hyacinth Halvey: I never saw her, I think. 

Shawn Early: The creature, she was light 
this long while and not good in the head, and at 
the last lunacy came on her and she was tied and 
bound. Sometimes singing and dancing she does 
be, and sometimes troublesome. 

Miss Joyce: They had a right to keep her 
spancelled in the asylum. She would begrudge 
any respectable person to be walking the street. 
She 'd hoot you, she 'd shout you, she 'd clap her 
hands at you. She is a bJight in the town. 

Hyacinth Halvey: There is a lad along with 
her. 

Shawn Early: It is Davideen, her brother, 
that is innocent. He was left rambling from 
3 



34 The Full Moon 

place to place the time she was put within walls. 
{Cracked Mary and Davideen come in. 
Miss Joyce clings to Hyacinth's arm.) 

Cracked Mary: Give me a charity now, the 
way 1 11 be keeping a little rag on me and a little 
shoe to my foot. Give me the price of tobacco 
and the price of a grain of tea; for tobacco is 
blessed and tea is good for the head. 

Shawn Early: Give out now, Davideen, a 
verse of " The Heather Broom.'* That 's a 
splendid tune. 

Davideen: (Sings.) 

Oh, don't you remember, 
As it 's often I told you, 
As you passed through our kitchen, 
That a new broom sweeps clean? 
Come out now and buy one, 
Come out now and try one — 
(His voice cracks, and he breaks off, laughing 
foolishly.) 

Mrs. Broderick: He has a sweet note in his 
voice, but to know or to understand what he is 
doing, he could n't do it. 

Cracked Mary: Leave him a while. His song 
that does be clogged through the daytime, the 
same as the sight is clogged with myself. It 
is n't but in the night time I can see anything 
worth while. Davy is a proper boy, a proper boy ; 



The Full Moon 35 

let you leave Davy alone. It was himself came 
before me ere yesterday in the morning, and I 
walking out the madhouse door. 

Shawn Early: It is often there will fiddlers be 
waiting to play for them coming out, that are 
maybe the finest dancers of the day. 

Cracked Mary: Waiting before me he was, and 
no one to give him knowledge unless it might be 
the Big Man. I give you my word he near ate 
the face off me. As glad to see me he was as if 
I had dropped from heaven. Come hither to me, 
Davy, and give no heed to them. It is as dull 
and as lagging as themselves you would be maybe, 
and the world to be different and the moon to 
change its courses with the sun. 

Bartley Fallon: I never would wish to be put 
within a madhouse before I 'd die. 

Cracked Mary: Sorry they were losing me. 
There was not a better prisoner in it than my own 
four bones. 

Bartley Fallon: Squeals you would hear from 
it, they were telling me, like you 'd hear at the 
ringing of the pigs. Savages with whips beating 
them the same as hounds. You would not stand 
and listen to them for a hundred sovereigns. Of 
all bad things that can come upon a man, it is 
certain the madness is the last. 

Miss Joyce: It is likely she was well content in 
it, and the friends she had being of her own class. 



36 The Full Moon 

Cracked Mary: What way could you make 
friends with people would be always talking? 
Too much of talk and of noise there was in it, 
cursing, and praying, and tormenting; some 
dancing, some singing, and one writing a letter 
to a she devil called Lucifer. I not to close my 
ears, I would have lost the sound of Davideen's 
song. 

Miss Joyce: It was good shelter you got in it 
through the bad weather, and not to be out 
perishing under cold, the same as the starlings 
in the snow. 

Cracked Mary: I was my seven months in it, 
my seven months and a day. My good clothes 
that went astray on me and my boots. My fine 
gaudy dress was all moth-eated, that was worked 
with the wings of birds. To fall into dust and 
ashes it did, and the wings rose up into the high 
air. 

Bartley Fallon. Take care would the madness 
catch on to ourselves the same as the chin-cough 
or the pock. 

Mrs. Broderick: Ah, that 's not the way it 
goes travelling from one to another, but some 
that are naturally cracked and inherit it. 

Shawn Early: It is a family failing with her 
tribe. The most of them get giddy in their latter 
end. 

Miss Joyce: It might be it was sent as a 



The Full Moon 37 

punishment before birth, for to show the power 
of God. 

Peter Tannian: It is tea-drinking does it, 
and that is the reason it is on the wife it is apt to 
fall for the most part. 

Mrs. Broderick: Ah, there *s some does be 
thinking their wives is n't right, and there 's 
others think they are too right. There to be any 
fear of me going astray, I give you my word I 'd 
lose my wits on the moment. 

Hyacinth Halvey: There are some say it is the 
moon. 

Shawn Early: So it is too. The time the moon 
is going back, the blood that is in a person does 
be weakening, but when the moon is strong, the 
blood that moves strong in the same way. And 
it to be at the full, it drags the wits along with it, 
the same as it drags the tide. 

Mrs. Broderick: Those that are light show off 
more and have the talk of twenty the time it is 
at the full, that is sure enough. And to hold up 
a silk handkerchief and to look through it, you 
would see the four quarters of the moon; I was 
often told that. 

Miss Joyce: It is not you, Mr. Halvey, will 
give in to an unruly thing like the moon, that is 
under no authority, and cannot be put back, the 
same as a fast day that would chance to fall 
upon a feast. 



38 The Full Moon 

Hyacinth Halvey: It is likely it is put in the 
sky the same as a clock for our use, the way you 
would pick knowledge of the weather, the time 
the stars would be wild about it. 

Mrs. Broderick: That is very nice now. The 
thing you 'd know, you 'd like to go on, and to 
hear more or less about it. 

Miss Joyce: (To H. H.) It is a lantern for 
your own use it will be to-night, and his Reverence 
coming home through the street, and yourself 
coming along with him to the house. 

Mrs. Broderick: That 's right, Miss Joyce. 
Keep a good grip of him. What do you say to him 
talking a while ago as if his mind was running on 
some thought to leave Cloon? 

Miss Joyce: What way could he leave it? 

Hyacinth Halvey: No way at all, I *m thinking, 
unless there would be a miracle worked by the 
moon. 

Mrs. Broderick: Ah, miracles is gone out of 
the world this long time, with education, unless 
that they might happen in your own inside. 

Miss Joyce: I '11 go set the table and kindle 
the fire, and I '11 come back to meet the train 
with you myself. 

(She goes. A noise heard outside.) 

Hyacinth Halvey: What is that now? 

Shawn Early: (At door.) Some noise as of 
running. 



The Full Moon 39 

Bartley Fallon: {Going to door.) It might chance 
to be some prisoner they would be bringing to the 
train. 

Peter Tannian: No, but some lads that are 
running. 

{They go out. H. H. is going too, but Mrs. 
Broderick goes before him and turns him 
round in doorway.) 

Mrs. Broderick: Don't be coming out now in 
the dust that was formed by the heat is in the 
breeze. It would be a pity to spoil your Dublin 
coat, or your shirt that is that white you would 
nearly take it to be blue. 

{She goes out, pushing him in and shutting 
door after her.) 

Cracked Mary: Ha ! ha ! ha ! 

Hyacinth Halvey: What is it you are laughing 
at? 

Cracked Mary: Ha! ha! ha! It is a very 
laughable thing now, the third most laughable 
thing I ever met with in my lifetime. 

Hyacinth Halvey: What is that? 

Cracked Mary: A fine young man to be shut 
up and bound in a narrow little shed, and the full 
moon rising, and I knowing what I know! 

Hyacinth Halvey: It 's little you are likely to 
know about me. 

Cracked Mary: Tambourines and fiddles and 
pipes — melodeons and the whistling of drums. 



40 The Full Moon 

Hyacinth Halvey: I suppose it is the Carrow 
fair you are talking about. 

Cracked Mary: Sitting within walls, and a 
top-coat wrapped around him, and mirth and 
music and frolic being in the place we know, and 
some dancing sets on the floor. 

Hyacinth Halvey: I wish I was n't in this 
place to-night. I would like well to be going on 
the train, if it was n't for the talk the neighbours 
would be making. I would like well to slip away. 
It is a long time I am going without any sort of 
funny comrades. 

{Goes to door. The others enter quickly, 
pushing him back.) 

Bartley Fallon: Nothing at all to see. It would 
be best for us to have stopped where we were. 

Mrs. Broderick: Running like foals to see it, 
and nothing to be in it worth while. 

Hyacinth Halvey: What was it was in it? 

Shawn Early: Nothing at all but some lads 
that were running in pursuit of a dog. 

Bartley Fallon: Near knocked us they did, 
and they coming round the corner of the wall. 

Hyacinth Halvey: Is it that it was a mad dog? 

Peter Tannian: Ah, what mad? Mad dogs 
are done away with now by the head Government 
and muzzles and the police. 

Bartley Fallon: They are more watchful over 
them than they used. But all the same, you to 



The Full Moon 41 

see a strange dog afar off, you would be uneasy, 
thinking it might be yourself he would be search- 
ing out as his prey. 

Mrs. Broderick: Sure, there did a dog go mad 
through Galway, and the whole town rose against 
him, and flocked him into a corner, and shot him 
there. He did no harm after, he being made an 
end of at the first. 

Shawn Early: It might be that dog they were 
pursuing after was mad, on the head of being 
under the full moon. 

Cracked Mary: {Jumping up excitedly.) That 
mad dog, he is a Dublin dog; he is betune you 
and Belfast — he is running ahead — you could n't 
keep up with him. 

Hyacinth Halvey: There is one, so, mad upon 
the road. 

Cracked Mary: There is police after him, but 
they cannot come up with him; he destroyed a 
splendid sow ; nine bonavs they buried or less. 

Shawn Early: What place is he gone now? 

Cracked Mary: He made off towards Craugh- 
well, and he bit a fine young man. 

Bartley Fallon: So he would too. Sure, when 
a mad dog would be going about, on horseback 
or wherever you are, you 're ruined. 

Cracked Mary: That dog is going on all the 
time ; he would n't stop, but go ahead and bring 
that mouthful with him. He is still on the road; 



42 The Full Moon 

he is keeping the middle of the road; they say he 
is as big as a calf. 

Hyacinth Halvey: It is the police I have a 
right to forewarn to go after him. 

Cracked Mary: The motor cars is going to get 
out to track him, for fear he would destroy the 
world ! 

Mrs. Broderick: That is a very nice thought 
now, to be sending the motor cars after him to 
overturn and to crush him the same as an ass-car 
in their path. 

Cracked Mary: You can't save yourself from 
a dog; he is after his own equals, dogs. He is 
doing every harm. They are out night and day. 

Shawn Early: Sure, a mad dog would go from 
this A to Kinvara in a half a minute, like the train. 

Cracked Mary: He won't stay in this country 
down — he goes the straight road — he takes by 
the wind. He is as big as a yearling calf. 

Mrs. Broderick: I would n't ever forgive myself 
I to see him. 

Cracked Mary: He is not very heavy yet. 
There is only the relics in him. 

Hyacinth Halvey: They have a right to bring 
their rifles in their hand. 

Cracked Mary: The police is afraid of their 
life. They wrote for motor cars to follow him. 
Sure, he 'd destroy the beasts of the field. A milch 
cow, he to grab at her, she 's settled. Terrible 



The Full Moon 43 

wicked he is; he 's as big as five dogs, and he does 
be very strong. I hope in the Lord he '11 be 
caught. It will be a blessing from the Almighty 
God to kill that dog. 

Hyacinth Halvey: He is surely the one is 
raging through the street. 

Peter Tannian: Why wouldn't he be him? 
Is it likely there would be two of them in it at the 
one time? 

Shawn Early: A queer cut of a dog he was; 
a lurcher, a bastard hound. 

Peter Tannian: I would say him to be about 
the size of the foal of a horse. 

Mrs. Broderick: Didn't he behave well not 
to do ourselves an injury? 

Bartley Fallon: It is likely he will do great 
destruction. I would n't say but I felt the weight 
of him and his two paws around my neck. 

Hyacinth Halvey: I will go out following 
him. 

Shawn Early: {Holding him.) Oh, let you 
not endanger yourself! It is the peelers should 
go follow him, that are armed with their batons 
and their guns. 

Hyacinth Halvey: I '11 go. He might do some 
injury going through the town. 

Mrs. Broderick: Ah now, it is not yourself we 
would let go into danger! It is Peter Tannian 
should go, if any person should go. 



44 The Full Moon 

Peter Tannian: Is it Hyacinth Halvey you 
are taking to be so far before myself? 

Mrs. Broderick: Why would n't he be before 
you? 

Peter Tannian: Ask him what was he in 
Carrow? Ask was he a sort of a corner-boy, 
ringing the bell, pumping water, gathering a few 
coppers in the daytime for to scatter on a game 
of cards. 

Hyacinth Halvey: Stop your lies and your chat ! 

Mrs. Broderick: {to Tannian) You are going 
light in the head to talk that way. 

Shawn Early: He is, and queer in the mind. 
Take care did he get a bite from the dog, that 
left some venom working in his blood. 

Hyacinth Halvey: So he might, and he having 
a sort of a little rent in his sleeve. 

Peter Tannian: I to have got a bite from the 
dog, is it? I did not come anear him at all. 
You to strip me as bare as winter you will not 
find the track of his teeth. It is Shawn Early 
was nearer to him than what I was. 

Shawn Early: I was not nearer, or as near as 
what Mrs. Broderick was. 

Mrs. Broderick: I made away when I saw him. 
My chest is not the better of it yet. Since I 
left off fretting I got gross. I am that nervous 
I would run from a blessed sheep, let alone a dog. 

Shawn Early: To see any of the signs of mad- 



The Full Moon 45 

ness upon him, it is Mr. Halvey the sergeant 
would look to for to make his report. 

Hyacinth Halvey: So I would make a report. 

Peter Tannian: Is it that you lay down you 
can see signs? Is that the learning they were 
giving you in Carrow? 

Mrs. Broderick: Don't be speaking with him 
at all. It is easy know the signs. A person 
to be laughing and mocking, and that would not 
have the same habits with yourself, or to have 
no fear of things you would be in dread of, or to 
be using a different class of food. 

Peter Tannian: I use no food but clean food. 

Hyacinth Halvey: To be giddy in the head is 
a sign, and to be talking of things that passed 
years ago. 

Peter Tannian: I am talking of nothing but 
the thing I have a right to talk of. 

Mrs. Broderick: To be nervous and thinking 
and pausing, and playing with knicknacks. 

Peter Tannian: It never was my habit to be 
playing with knicknacks. 

Bartley Fallon: When the master in the school 
where I was went queer, he beat me with two 
clean rods, and wrote my name with my own blood. 

Mrs. Broderick: To take the shoe off their 
foot, and to hit out right and left with it, bawling 
their life out, tearing their clothes, scattering 
and casting them in every part; or to run naked 



46 The Full Moon 

through the town, and all the people after them. 

Shawn Early: To be jumping the height of 
trees they do be, and all the people striving to 
slacken them. 

Hyacinth Halvey: To steal prayer-books and 
rosaries, and to be saying prayers they never 
could keep in mind before. 

Mrs. Broderick: Very strong, that they could 
leap a wall — jumping and pushing and kicking — 
or to tie people to one another with a rope. 

Shawn Early: Any fear of any person here 
being violent, Mr. Halvey will get him put under 
restraint. 

Peter Tannian: Is it myself you are thinking 
to put under restraint? Would a man would be 
pushing and kicking and tearing his clothes, be 
able to do arithmetic on a board? Look now at 
that. {Chalks figures on door.) Three and three 
makes six ! — and three 

Mrs. Broderick: I 'm no hand at figuring, but 
I can say out a blessed hymn, what any person 
with the mind gone contrary in them could not do. 
Hearken now till you '11 know is there confusion 
in my mind. (Sings.) 

Mary Broderick is my name; 

Fiddane was my station; 
Cloon is my dwelling-place; 

And (I hope) heaven is my destination. 



The Full Moon 47 

Mary Broderick is my name, 
Cloon was my 

Cracked Mary: (With a cackle of delight.) 
Give heed to them now, Davideen! That 's the 
way the crazed people used to be going on in the 
place where I was, every one thinking the other 
to be cracked. 

Hyacinth Halvey: (To Tannian.) Look now 
at your great figuring! Argus with his hundred 
eyes would n't know is that a nought or is it a 
nine without a tail. 

Peter Tannian: Leave that blame on a little 
ridge that is in the nature of the chalk. Look 
now at Mary Broderick, that it has failed to word 
out her verse. 

Mrs. Broderick: Ah, what signifies? I 'd 
never get light greatly. It would n't be worth 
while I to go mad. 

(Bartley Fallon gives a deep groan.) 

Shawn Early: What is on you, Bartley? 

Bartley Fallon: I 'm in dread it is I myself 
has got the venom into my blood. 

Hyacinth Halvey: What makes you think that? 

Bartley Fallon: It 's a sort of a thing would 
be apt to happen me, and any malice to fall within 
the town at all. 

Mrs. Broderick: Give heed to him, Hyacinth 
Halvey; you are the most man we have to 



48 The Full Moon 

baffle any wrong thing coming in our midst! 

Hyacinth Halvey: Is it that you are feeling 
any pain as of a wound or a sore? 

Bartley Fallon: Some sort of a little catch I 'm 
thinking there is in under my knee. I would feel 
no pain unless I would turn it contrary. 

Hyacinth Halvey: What class of feeling would 
you say you are feeling? 

Bartley Fallon: I am feeling as if the five fingers 
of my hand to be lessening from me, the same as 
five farthing dips the heat of the sun would be 
sweating the tallow from. 

Hyacinth Halvey: That is a strange account. 

Bartley Fallon: And a sort of a megrim in my 
head, the same as a sheep would get a fit of 
staggers in a field. 

Hyacinth Halvey: That is what I would look 
for. Is there some sort of a roaring in your ear? 

Bartley Fallon: There is, there is, as if I would 
hear voices would be talking. 

Hyacinth Halvey: Would you feel any wish 
to go tearing and destroying? 

Bartley Fallon: I would indeed, and there to 
be an enemy upon my path. Would you say 
now, Widow Broderick, am I getting anyway 
flushy in the face? 

Mrs. Broderick: Don't leave your eye off him 
for pity's sake. He is reddening as red as a rose. 

Bartley Fallon: I could as if walk on the 



The Full Moon 49 

wind with lightness. Something that is rising 
in my veins the same as froth would be rising on 
a pint. 

Hyacinth Halvey: It is the doctor I 'd best 
call for — and maybe the sergeant and the priest. 

Bartley Fallon: There are three thoughts going 
through my mind — to hang myself or to drown 
myself, or to cut my neck with a reaping-hook. 

Mrs. Broderick: It is the doctor will serve him 
best, where it is the mad blood that should be 
bled away. To break up eggs, the white of them, 
in a tin can, will put new blood in him, and whiskey, 
and to taste no food through twenty-one days. 

Bartley Fallon: I 'm thinking so long a fast 
would n't serve me. I would n't wish the lads 
will bear my body to the grave, to lay down there 
was nothing within it but a grasshopper or a wisp 
of dry grass. 

Shawn Early: No, but to cut a piece out of 
his leg the doctor will, the way the poison will 
get no leave to work. 

Peter Tannian: Or to burn it with red-hot 
irons, the way it will not scatter itself and grow. 
There does a doctor do that out in foreign. 

Mrs. Broderick: It would be more natural to 
cut the leg off him in some sort of a Christian way. 

Shawn Early: If it was a pig was bit, or a sow 
or a bonav, it to show the signs, it would be shot, 
if it was a whole fleet of them was in it. 



50 The Full Moon 

Mrs. Broderick: I knew of a man that was 
butler in a big house was bit, and they tied him 
first and smothered him after, and his master 
shot the dog. A splendid shot he was; the thing 
he 'd not see he 'd hit it the same as the thing he 'd 
see. I heard that from an outside neighbour of 
my own, a woman that told no lies. 

Shawn Early: Sure, they did the same thing to 
a high-up lady over in England, and she after 
being bit by her own little spaniel and it having 
a ring around its neck. 

Peter Tannian: That is the only best thing to 
do. Whether the bite is from a dog, or a cat, or 
whatever it may be, to put the quilt and the 
blankets on the person and smother him in the 
bed. To smother them out-and-out you should, 
before the madness will work. 

Hyacinth Halvey: I 'd be loth he to be shot 
or smothered. I 'd sooner to give him a chance 
in the asylum. 

Mrs. Broderick: To keep him there and to try 
him through three changes of the moon. It 's 
well for you, Bartley, Mr. Halvey being in charge 
of you, that is known to be a tender man. 

Peter Tannian: He to have got a bite and to 
go biting others, he would put in them the same 
malice. It is the old people used to tell that 
down, and they must have had some reason 
doing that. 



The Full Moon 51 

Shawn Early: To get a bite of a dog you must 
chance your life. There is no doubt at all about 
that. It might work till the time of the new 
moon or the full moon, and then they must be 
shot or smothered. 

Hyacinth Halvey: It is a pity there to be no 
cure found for it in the world. 

Shawn Early: There never came out from the 
Almighty any cure for a mad dog. 

{Bartley Fallon has been edging towards door.) 

Shawn Early: Oh! stop him and keep a hold 
of him, Mr. Halvey ! 

Hyacinth Halvey: Stop where you are. 

Bartley Fallon: Is n't it enough to have mad- 
ness before me, that you will not let me go fall in 
my own choice place? 

Hyacinth Halvey: The neighbours would think 
it bad of me to let a raving man out into their 
midst. 

Bartley Fallon: Is it to shoot me you are going? 

Hyacinth Halvey: I will call to the doctor to 
say is the padded room at the workhouse the most 
place where you will be safe, till such time as it 
will be known did the poison wear away. 

Bartley Fallon: I will not go in it ! It is likely 
I might be forgot in it, or the nurses to be in dread 
to bring me nourishment, and they to hear me 
barking within the door. I 'm thinking it was 
allotted by nature I never would die an easy death. 



52 The Full Moon 

Hyacinth Halvey: I will keep a watch over you 
myself. 

Bartley Fallon: Where 's the use of that the 
time the breath will be gone out of me, and you 
maybe playing cards on my coffin, and I having 
nothing around or about me but the shroud, and 
the habit, and the little board? 

Hyacinth Halvey: Sure, I cannot leave you 
the way you are. 

Bartley Fallon: It is what I ever and always 
heard, a dog to bite you, all you have to do is to 
take a pinch of its hair and to lay it into the wound. 

Mrs. Broderick: So I heard that myself. A 
dog to bite any person he is entitled to be plucked 
of his hair. 

Hyacinth Halvey: I '11 go out; I might chance 
to see him. 

Mrs. Broderick: You will not, without getting 
advice from the priest that is coming in the train. 
Let his Reverence come into this place, and say is 
it Bartley or is it Peter Tannian was done de- 
struction on by the dog. 

Shawn Early: There is a surer way than that. 

Mrs. Broderick: What way? 

Shawn Early: It takes madness to find out 
madness. Let you call to the cracked woman 
that should know. 

Hyacinth Halvey: Come hither, Mary, and tell 
us is there any one of your own sort in this shed? 



The Full Moon 53 

Mrs. Broderick: That is a good thought. It 
is only themselves that recognise one another. 

Bartley Fallon: Do not ask her! I will not 
leave it to her ! 

Mrs. Broderick: Sure, she cannot say more 
than what yourself has said against yourself. 

Bartley Fallon: I 'm in dread she might know 
too much, and be telling out what is within in my 
mind. 

Hyacinth Halvey: That 's foolishness. These 
are not the ancient times, when Ireland was full 
of haunted people. 

Bartley Fallon: Is a man having a wife and 
three acres of land to be put under the judgment 
of a witch? 

Hyacinth Halvey: I would not give in to any 
pagan thing, but to recognise one of her own sort, 
that is a thing can be understood. 

Mrs. Broderick: So it could be too, the same 
as witnesses in a court. 

Bartley Fallon: I will not give in to going to 
demons or druids or freemasons! Wasn't there 
enough of misfortune set before my path through 
every day of my lifetime without it to be linked 
with me after my death? Is it that you would 
force me to lose the comforts of heaven and to 
get the poverty of hell? I tell you I will have no 
trade with witches! I would sooner go face the 
featherbeds. 



54 The Full Moon 

Hyacinth Halvey: Say out, girl, do you see 
any craziness here or anything of the sort? 

Cracked Mary: Every day in the year there 
comes some malice into the world, and where it 
comes from is no good place. 

Mrs. Broderick: That is it, a venomous dew, 
as in the year of the famine. There is no as- 
tronomer can say it is from the earth or the sky. 

Hyacinth Halvey: It is what we are asking you, 
did any of that malice get its scope in this place ? 

Cracked Mary: That was settled in Mayo two 
thousand years ago. 

Mrs. Broderick: Ah, there 's no head or tail 
to that one's story. You 'd be left at the latter 
end the same as at the commencement. 

Hyacinth Halvey: That dog you were talking 
of, that is raging through the district and the 
town — did it leave any madness after it? 

Cracked Mary: It will go in the wind, there is 
a certain time for that. It might go off in the 
wind again. It might go shaping off and do no 
harm. 

Bartley Fallon: Where is that dog presently, 
till some person might go pluck out a few ribs 
of its hair? 

Cracked Mary: Raging ever and always it is, 
raging wild. Sure, that is a dog was in it before 
the foundations of the world. 

Peter Tannian: Who is it now that venom fell 



The Full Moon 55 

on, whatever beasts jaws may have scattered 
it? 

Cracked Mary: It is the full moon knows that. 
The moon to slacken it is safe, there is no harm 
in it. Almighty God will do that much. He '11 
slacken it like you 'd slacken lime. 

Shawn Early: There is reason in what she is 
saying. Set open the door and let the full moon 
call its own ! 

Bartley Fallon: Don't let in the rays of it 
upon us or I'm a gone man. It to shine on them 
that are going wrong in the head, it would raise 
a great stir in the mind. Sure, it *s in the asylum 
at that time they do have whips to chastise them. 
{Goes to corner.) 

Cracked Mary: That 's it. The moon is ter- 
rible. The full moon cracks them out and out, 
any one that would have any spleen or any relics 
in them. 

Mrs. Broderick: Do not let in the light of it. 
I would scruple to look at it myself. 

Cracked Mary: Let you throw open the door, 
Davideen. It is not ourselves are in dread that 
the white man in the sky will be calling names 
after us and ridiculing us. Ha! ha! I might 
be as foolish as yourselves and as fearful, but for 
the Almighty that left a little cleft in my skull, 
that would let in His candle through the nighU 
time. 



56 The Full Moon 

Hyacinth Halvey: Hurry on now, tell us is 
there any one in this place is wild and astray like 
yourself. 

(He opens the door. The light falls on him.) 

Cracked Mary: (Putting her hand on him.) 
There was great shouting in the big round house, 
and you coming into it last night. 

Hyacinth Halvey: What are you saying? I 
never went frolicking in the night time since the 
day I came into Cloon. 

Cracked Mary: We were talking of it a while 
ago. I knew you by the smile and by the laugh 
of you. A queen having a yellow dress, and the 
hair on her smooth like marble. All the dead of 
the village were in it, and of the living myself and 
yourself. 

Hyacinth Halvey: I thought it was of Carrow 
she was talking; it is of the other world she is 
raving, and of the shadow-shapes of the forth. 

Cracked Mary: You have the door open — 
the speckled horses are on the road ! — make a leap 
on the horse as it goes by, the horse that is without 
a rider. Can't you hear them puffing and roaring ? 
Their breath is like a fog upon the air. 

Hyacinth Halvey: What you hear is but the 
train puffing afar off. 

Cracked Mary: Make a snap at the bridle as it 
passes by the bush in the western gap. Run out 
now, run, where you have the bare ridge of the 



The Full Moon 57 

world before you, and no one to take orders from 
but yourself, maybe, and God. 

Hyacinth Halvey: Ah, what way can I run to 
any place ! 

Cracked Mary: Stop where you are, so. In 
my opinion it is little difference the moon can 
see between the whole of ye. Come on, Davideen, 
come out now, we have the wideness of the night 
before us. O golden God ! All bad things quieten 
in the night time, and the ugly thing itself will 
put on some sort of a decent face! Come out 
now to the night that will give you the song, and 
will show myself out as beautiful as Helen of the 
Greek gods, that hanged herself the day there 
first came a wrinkle on her face ! 

Davideen: (Coming close, and taking her hand 
as he sings.) 

Oh! don't you remember 
What our comrades called to us 
And they footing steps 
At the call of the moon? 
Come out to the rushes, 
Come out to the bushes, 
Where the music is called 
By the lads of Queen Anne ! 

(They look beautiful. They dance and sing 
in perfect time as they go out.) 
Peter Tannian: (Closing the door, and pointing 



58 The Full Moon 

at Hyacinth, who stands gazing after them, and when 
the door is shut sits down thinking deeply.) It is 
on him her judgment fell, and a clear judgment. 

Shaidn Early: She gave out that award fair 
enough. 

Peter Tannian: Did you take notice, and he 
coming into the shed, he had like some sort of a 
little twist in his walk? 

Mrs. Broderick: I would be loth to think there 
would be any poison lurking in his veins. Where 
now would it come from, and Cracked Mary's 
dog being as good as no dog at all? 

Peter Tannian: It might chance, and he a 
child in the cradle, to get the bite of a dog. It 
might be only now, its full time being come, its 
power would begin to work. 

Mrs. Broderick: So it would too, and he but 
to see the shadow of the dog bit him in a body 
glass, or in the waves, and he himself looking 
over a boat, and as if called to throw himself in 
the tide. But I would not have thought it of Mr. 
Halvey. Well, it 's as hard to know what might 
be spreading abroad in any person's mind, as to 
put the body of a horse out through a cambric _ 
needle. (Hyacinth looks at them.) 

Shawn Early: Be quiet now, he is going to say 
some word. 

Hyacinth Halvey: There is a thought in my 
mind. I think it was coming this good while. 



The Full Moon 59 

Shawn Early: Whisht now and listen. 

Hyacinth Halvey: I made a great mistake 
coming into this place. 

Peter Tannian: There was some mistake made 
anyway. 

Hyacinth: It is foolishness kept me in it ever 
since. It is too big a name was put upon me. 

Peter Tannian: It is the power of the moon is 
forcing the truth out of him. 

Hyacinth Halvey: Every person in the town 
giving me out for more than I am. I got too 
much of that in the heel. 

Shawn Early: He is talking queer now anyway. 

Hyacinth Halvey: Calling to me every little 
minute — expecting me to do this thing and that 
thing — watching me the same as a watchdog, 
their eyes as if fixed upon my face. 

Mrs. Broderick: To be giving out such strange 
thoughts, he has n't much brains left around 
him. 

Hyacinth Halvey: I looking to be Clerk of the 
Union, and the place I had giving me enough to 
do, and too much to do. Tied on this side, tied 
on that side. I to be bothered with business 
through the holy livelong day! 

Peter Tannian: It is good pay he got with it. 
Eighty pounds a year does n't come on the wind. 

Hyacinth Halvey: In danger to be linked and 
wed — I never ambitioned it — with a woman 



60 The Full Moon 

would want me to be earning through every day 
of the year. 

Shawn Early: He is a gone man surely. 

Hyacinth Halvey: The wide ridge of the world 
before me, and to have no one to look to for 
orders ; that would be better than roast and boiled 
and all the comforts of the day. I declare to 
goodness, and I 'd nearly take my oath, I 'd 
sooner be among a fleet of tinkers, than attending 
meetings of the Board ! 

Mrs. Broderick: If there are fairies in it, it 
is in the fairies he is. 

Peter Tannian: Give me a hold of that chain. 

Mrs. Broderick: What is it you are about to do ? 

Peter Tannian: To bind him to the chair I will 

before he will burst out wild mad. Come over 

here, Bartley Fallon, and lend a hand if you can. 

{Bartley Fallon appears from corner with a 

chicken crate over his head.) 

Mrs. Broderick: O Bartley, that is the strangest 
lightness ever I saw, to go bind a chicken crate 
around your skull ! 

Bartley Fallon: "Will you tighten the knots I 
have tied, Peter Tannian! I am in dread they 
might slacken or fail. 

Shawn Early: Was there ever seen before this 
night such power to be in the moon ! 

Bartley Fallon: It would seem to be putting 
very wild unruly thoughts a-through me, stirring 



The Full JMoon 61 

up whatever spleen or whatever relics was left 
in me by the nature of the dog. 

Peter Tannian: Is it that you think those rods, 
spaced wide, as they are, will keep out the moon 
from entering your brain? 

Bartley Fallon: There does great strength 
come at the time the wrts would be driven out of 
a person. I never was handled by a policeman — 
but once — and never hit a blow on any man. I 
would not wish to destroy my neighbour or to 
have his blood on my hands. 

Shawn Early: It is best keep out of his reach. 

Bartley Fallon: The way I have this fixed, 
there is no person will be the worse for me. I to 
rush down the street and to meet with my most 
enemy in some lonesome craggy place, it would 
fail me, and I thrusting for it to scatter any share 
of poison in his body or to sink my teeth in his 
skin. I would n't wonder I to have hung for 
some of you, and that plan not to have come into 
my head. 

{Whistle of train heard.) 

Hyacinth Halvey: (Getting up.) I have my mind 
made up, I am going out of this on that train. 

Peter Tannian: You are not going so easy as 
what you think. 

Hyacinth Halvey: Let you mind your own 
business. 

Peter Tannian: I am well able to mind it. 



62 The Full Moon 

Hyacinth Halvey: {Throwing off top -coat.) You 
cannot keep me here. 

Peter Tannian: Give me a hand with the chain. 
(They throw it round Hyacinth and hold 
him.) 

Hyacinth Halvey: Is it out of your senses you 
are gone? 

Peter Tannian: Not at all, but yourself that 
is gone raving mad from the fury and the strength 
of some dog. 

Miss Joyce: (At door.) Are you there, Hya- 
cinth Halvey? The train is in. Come forward 
now, and give a welcome to his Reverence. 

Hyacinth Halvey: Let me go out of this ! 

Miss Joyce: You are near late as it is. The 
train is about to start. 

Hyacinth Halvey: Let me go, or I '11 tear the 
heart out of ye ! 

Shawn Early: Oh, he is stark, staring mad ! 

Hyacinth Halvey: Mad, am I? Bit by a dog, 
am I? You '11 see am I mad! I '11 show mad- 
ness to you ! Let go your hold or I '11 skin you ! 
I '11 destroy you ! I '11 bite you ! I 'm a red 
enemy to the whole of you ! Leave go your grip ! 
Yes, I 'm mad! Bow wow wow, wow wow! 

(They let go and fall back in terror \ and he 
rushes out of the door.) 

Miss Joyce: What at all has happened? 
Where is he gone? 



The Full Moon 63 

Shawn Early: To the train he is gone, and away 
in it he is gone. 

Miss Joyce: He gave some sort of a bark or a 
howl. 

Shawn Early: He is gone clean mad. Great 
arguing he had, and leaping and roaring. 

Bartley Fallon: {Taking off crate.) He went 
very near to tear us all asunder. I declare I 
am n't worth a match. 

Mrs. Broderick: He made a reel in my head, 
till I don't know am I right myself. 

Shawn Early: Bawling his life out, tearing 
his clothes, tearing and eating them. Look at 
his top-coat he left after him. 

Bartley Fallon: He poured all over with pure 
white foam. 

Peter Tannian: There now is an end of your 
elegant man. 

Shawn Early: Bit he was with the mad dog 
that went tearing, and lads chasing him a while 
ago. 

Miss Joyce: Sure that was Tannian's own dog, 
that had a bit of meat snapped from Quirke's 
ass-car. He is without this door now. (All 
look out.) He has the appearance of having a 
full meal taken. 

Bartley Fallon: And they to be saying I went 
mad. That is the way always, and a thing to 
be tasked to me that was not in it at all. 



64 The Full Moon 

Mrs. Broderick: {Laying her hand on Miss 
Joyce's shoulder.) Take comfort now; and if it 
was the moon done all, and has your bachelor 
swept, let you not begrudge it its full share of 
praise for the hand it had in banishing a strange 
bird, might have gone wild and bawling like eleven, 
and you after being wed with him, and would 
maybe have put a match to the roof. And 
had n't you the luck of the world now, that you 
did not give notice to the priest ! 

Curtain 



COATS 



65 



Hazel . . . EDITOR OF " CHAMPION " 

Mineog . . . editor of "tribune* ' 

John A WAITER 



66 



COATS 
Scene: Dining room of Royal Hotel Cloonmore. 

Hazel: {Coming in.) Did Mr. Mineog come 
yet, John? 

John: He did not, Mr. Hazel. Ah, he won't 
be long coming. It 's seldom he does be late. 

Hazel: Is the dinner ready? 

John: It is, sir. Boiled beef and parsnips, 
the same as every Monday for all comers, and an 
apple pie for yourself and Mr. Mineog. 

Mineog: {Coming in.) Mr. Hazel is the first 
to-night. I 'm glad to see you looking so good. 

{They take off coats and give to waiter.) 

Mineog: Put that on its own peg. 

Hazel: And mine on its own peg to the rear. 

John: I will, sir. {He drops coats in putting 
them up. Then notices broken pane in window and 
picks up the coats hurriedly, putting them on wrong 
pegs. Hazel and Mineog have sat down.) 

Hazel: Have you any strange news? 

Mineog: I have but the same news I always 
have, that it is quick Monday comes around, and 
that it is hard make provision for to fill up the 
four sheets of the Tribune, and nothing happen- 

67 



68 Coats 

ing in these parts worth while. There would seem 
to be no news on this day beyond all days of the 
year. 

Hazel: Sure there is the same care and the 
same burden on myself. I wish I did n't put a 
supplement to the Champion. The deer knows 
what way will I fill it between this and Thursday, 
or in what place I can go questing after news ! 

Mineog: Last week passed without anything 
doing. It is a very backward place to give 
information for two papers. If it was not for 
the league is between us, and for us meeting here 
on every Monday to make sure we are taking 
different sides on every question may turn up, 
and giving every abuse to one another in print, 
there is no person would pay his penny for the 
two of them, or it may be for the one of them. 

Hazel: That is so. And the worst is, there 
is no question ever rises that we do not agree on, 
or that would have power to make us fall out in 
earnest. It was different in my early time. The 
questions used to rise up then were worth fighting 
for. 

Mineog: There are some people so cantanker- 
ous they will heat themselves in argument as 
to which side might be right or wrong in a war, or 
if wars should be in it at all, or hangings. 

Hazel: Ah, when they are as long on the road 
as we are, they '11 take things easy. 



Coats 69 

Mineog: Now all the kingdoms of the earth 
to go struggling on one wrong side or another, or 
to bring themselves down to dust and ashes, it 
would not break our friendship. In all the years 
past there never did a cross word rise between us. 

Hazel: There never will. What are the fights of 
politics and parties beside living neighbourly with 
one another, and to go peaceable to the grave, our 
selves that are the oldest residents in the Square. 

Mineog: It will be long indeed before you will 
be followed to the grave. You didn't live no 
length yet. You are too fresh to go out and to 
forsake your wife and your family. 

Hazel: Ah, when the age would be getting up 
on you, you would n't be getting younger. But 
it 's yourself that is as full of spirit as a four-year- 
old. I wish I had a sovereign for every year you 
will reign after me in the Square. 

Mineog: {Sneezes.) There is a draught of 
air coming in the window. 

Hazel: {Rising.) Take care might it be open 
— no, but a pane that is out. There is a very 
chilly breeze sweeping in. 

Mineog: {Rising.) I will put on my coat so. 
There is no use giving provocation to a cold. 

Hazel: I '11 do the same myself. It is hard 
to banish a sore throat. 

{They put on coats. John brings in dinner. 
They sit down.) 



70 Coats 

Mineog: See can you baffle that draught of 
air, John. 

John: I '11 go in search of something to stop 
it, sir. This bit of a board I brought is too 
unshapely. 

Mineog: Two columns of the Tribune as empty 
yet as anything you could see. I had them kept 
free for the Bishop's speech and he did n't come 
after. 

Hazel: That 's the same cause has left myself 
with so wide a gap. 

Mineog: In the years past there used always 
to be something happening such as famines, or 
the invention of printing. The whole world has 
got very slack. 

Hazel: You are a better hand than what I am 
at filling odd spaces would be left bare. It is 
often I think the news you put out comes partly 
from your own brain, and the prophecies you lay 
down about the weather and the crops. 

Mineog: Ah, I might stick in a bit of invention 
sometimes, when I 'm put to the pin of my collar. 

Hazel: I might maybe make an attack on the 
Tribune for that. 

Mineog: Ah, what is it but a white sin. Sure 
it tells every person the same thing. It does n't 
tell many lies, it goes somewhere anear it. 

Hazel: I spent a good while this evening 
searching through the shelves of the press I have 



Coats 71 

in the office. I write an article an odd time, when 
there is nothing doing, that might come handy in a 
hurry. 

Mineog: So have I a press of the sort, and 
shelves in it. I am after going through them 
to-day. 

Hazel: But it 's hard find a thing would be 
suitable, unless you might dress it up again 
someway fresh. 

Mineog: I made a thought and I searching a 
while ago. I was thinking it would be a very 
nice thing to show respect to yourself, and friend- 
liness, putting down a short account of you and of 
all you have done for your family and for the town. 

Hazel: That is a strange thing now! I had 
it in my mind to do the very same service to 
yourself. 

Mineog: Is that so? 

Hazel: Your worth and your generosity and 
the way you have worked the Tribune for your 
own and for the public good. 

Mineog: And another thing. I not only 
thought to write it but I am after writing it. 

Hazel: {Suspiciously.) You had not much 
time for that. 

Mineog: I never was one to spare myself in 
anything that could benefit a friend. 

Hazel: Neither would I spare myself. I have 
my article wrote. 



72 Coats 

Mineog: I have a mind to read my own one to 
you, the way you will know there is nothing in it 
but what is friendly and is kind. 

Hazel: I will do the same thing. There 's 
nothing I have said in it but what you will like 
to be hearing. 

Mineog: {Who has rummaged pockets.) I 

thought I put it in the inside pocket no 

matter — here it is. 

Hazel: {Rummaging.) Here is my one. I 
was thinking I had it lost. 

Mineog: {Reading, after he has turned over a 
couple of sheets rapidly.) "Born and bred in 
this Square, he took his chief pride in his native 
town." 

Hazel: {Turning over two sheets.) "It was in 
this parish and district he spent the most part of 

his promising youth Richly stored with 

world-wide knowledge." 

Mineog: "Well able to give out an opinion 
on any matter at all." 

Hazel: "To lay down his mind on paper it 
would be hard to beat him." 

Mineog: " With all that, humble that he would 

halt and speak to you the same as a child " 

I 'm maybe putting it down a bit too simple, but 
the printer will give it a little shaping after. 

Hazel: So will my own printer be lengthening 
out the words for me according to the type and 



Coats 73 

the letters of the alphabet he will have plentiful 
and to spare. 

Mineog: "Well looking and well thought of. 
A true Irishman in supporting all forms of sport.' ' 

Hazel: What 's that? I never was one for 
betting on races or gaining prizes for riddles. 

Mineog: It is strange now I have no recollec- 
tion of putting that down. It is I myself in the 
days gone by would put an odd shilling on a horse. 

Hazel: These typewriters would bother the 
world. Wait now — let me throw an eye on those 
papers you have in your hand. 

Mineog: Not at all. I would sooner be giving 
it out to you myself. 

Hazel: Of course it is very pleasing to be 
listening to so nice an account — but lend it a 
minute. {Puts out hand.) 

Mineog: Bring me now a bottle of wine, John 
— you know the sort — till I '11 drink to Mr. 
Hazel's good health. 

John: I will, sir. 

Hazel: No, but bring it at my own expense 
till I will drink to Mr. Mineog. Just give me a 
hold of that paper for one minute only. 

Mineog: Keep patience now. I will go through 
it with no delay. 

Hazel: {Making a snap.) Just for one minute. 

Mineog: {Clapping his hand on it.) What a 
hurry you are in! Stop now till I '11 find the 



74 Coats 

place. "Very rarely indeed has been met with so 
fair and so neighbourly a man." 

Hazel: Give me a look at it. 

Mineog: What is it ails you? You are uneasy 
about something. What is it you are hiding from 
me? 

Hazel: What would I have to hide but that 
the papers got mixed in some way, and you have 
in your hand what I wrote about yourself, and 
not what you wrote about myself? 

Mineog: What way did they get into the wrong 
pocket now? 

Hazel: {Putting MS. in his pocket.) Give me 
back my own and I will give you back your own. 

Mineog: I don't know. You are putting it 
in my mind there might be something underhand. 
I would like to make sure what did you say about 
me in the heel. {Turns over.) "He was honest 
and widely respected.* ' Was honest — are you 
saying me to be a rogue at this time? 

Hazel: That 's not fair dealing to be searching 
through it against my will. 

Mineog: "He was trusted through the whole 
townland." Was trusted — is it that you are 
making me out to be a thief? 

Hazel: Well, follow your own road and take 
your own way. 

Mineog: " Mr. Mineog leaves no family 

to lament his loss, but along with the Tribune, 



Coats 75 

which he fostered with the care of a father, we 
offer up prayers for the repose of his soul." 
{Stands up.) It is a notice of my death you are 
after writing ! 

Hazel: You should understand that. 

Mineog: An obituary notice! Of myself! Is 
it that you expect me to quit the living world 
between this and Thursday? 

Hazel: I had no thought of the kind. 

Mineog: I 'm not stretched yet! What call 
have you to go offer prayers for me? 

Hazel: I tell you I had it put by this long time 
till I would have occasion to use it. 

Mineog: Is it this long time, so, you have been 
waiting for my death? 

Hazel: Not at all. 

Mineog: You to kill me to-day and to think 
to bury me to-morrow ! 

Hazel: Can't you listen? I was wanting some- 
thing to fill space. 

Mineog: Would nothing serve you to fill space 
but only my own corpse? To go set my coffin 
making and to put nettles growing on my hearth ! 
Would n't it be enough to rob my house or to 
make an attack upon my means? Would n't 
that fill up the gap? 

Hazel: Let you not twist it that way ! 

Mineog: The time I was in the face of my little 
dinner to go startle me with a thing of the sort! 



76 Coats 

I 'm not worth the ground I stand on! For the 
Champion of next Thursday! I to be dead ere 
Thursday! 

Hazel: I looked for no such thing. 

Mineog: What is it makes you say me to be 
done and dying? Am I reduced in the face? 

Hazel: You are not. 

Mineog: Am I yellow and pale and shrunken? 

Hazel: Why would you be? 

Mineog: Would you say me to be crampy in 
the body? Am I staggery in the legs? 

Hazel: I see no such signs. 

Mineog: Is it in my hand you see them? Is 
it lame or is it freezed-brittle like ice? 

Hazel: It is as warm and as good as my own. 

Mineog: Let me take a hold of you till you 
will tell me has it the feel of a dead man's grip. 

Hazel: I know that it has not. 

Mineog: Is it shaking like a bunch of timber 
shavings? 

Hazel: Not at all, not at all. 

Mineog: It should be my hearing that is 
failing from me, or that I am crippled and have 
lost my walk. 

Hazel: You are roaring and bawling without 
sense. 

Mineog: Let the Champion go to flitters 
before I will die to please it ! I will not give in to 
it driving me out of the world before my hour is 



Coats 77 

spent ! It would hardly ask that of a man would 
be of no use and no account, or even of a beast of 
any consequence. 

Hazel: Who is asking you to die? 

Mineog: Giving no time hardly for the priest 
to overtake me and to give me the rites of the 
Church! 

Hazel: I tell you there is no danger of you 
giving up at all ! Every person knows there must 
some sickness come before death. Some take 
it from a neighbour and it is put on others by God. 

Mineog: Even so, it 's hard say. 

Hazel: You have not a ha'p'orth on you. No 
complaint in the world wide. 

Mineog: That 's nothing ! Sickness comes upon 
some as sudden as to clap their hands. 

Hazel: What are you talking about? You are 
thinking us to be in the days of the cholera yet! 

Mineog: There are yet other diseases besides 
that. 

Hazel: You put the measles over you and we 
going the road to school. 

Mineog: There is more than measles has power 
bring a man down. 

Hazel: You had the chin-cough passed and you 
rising. We were cut at the one time for the pock. 

Mineog: A disease to be allotted to you it 
would find you out, and you maybe up twenty 
mile in the air ! 



78 Coats 

Hazel: Ah, what disease could have you swept 
in the course of the next two days? 

Mineog: That is what I'm after saying — un- 
less you might have murder in your mind 

Hazel: Ah, what murder! 

Mineog: What way are you thinking to do 
away with me? To shoot me with the trigger of 
a gun and to give me shortening of life? 

Hazel: The trigger of a gun! God bless it, 
I never fingered such a thing in the length of my 
life! 

Mineog: To take aim at me and destroy me; 
to shoot me in forty halves like a crow in the time 
of the wheat ! 

Hazel: Oh, now, don't say a thing like that! 

Mineog: Or to drown me maybe in the river, 
enticing me across the rotten plank of the bridge. 
{Seizing bottle.) Will you tell me on the virtue 
of your oath, is death lurking in that sherry 
wine? 

Hazel: {Pulling out paper.) Ah, God bless 
your jig! And how would I know is it a notice 
of my own death has come into my hand in the 
pocket of this coat I put on me through a mistake? 

Mineog: Give it here. That 's my property ! 

Hazel: {Reading.) "We sympathise with Mrs. 
Hazel and the family." There is proof now. Is 
it that you would go grieving with my wife and 
I to be living yet? 



Coats 79 

Mineog: I did n't follow you out beyond this 
world with craving for the repose of your soul. 
It is nothing at all beside what you wrote. 

Hazel: Oh, I bear no grudge at all against you. 
I am not huffy and crabbed like yourself to go 
taking offence. Sure Kings and big people of 
the sort are used to see their dead-notices made 
ready from the hour of their birth out. And it 
is not anything printed on papers or any flight of 
words on the Tribune could give me any con- 
cern at all. See now will I be put out. (Reads.) 
What now is this? "Mr. Hazel was of good 
race, having in him the old stock of the country, 

the Mahons, the O'Hagans, the Casserlys ." 

Where now did you get that? I never heard 
before, a Casserly to be in my fathers. 

Mineog: It might be on the side of the mother. 

Hazel: It was not. My mother was a girl of 
the Hessians that was born in the year of the 
French. My grandmother was Winefred Kane. 

Mineog: What is being out in one name towards 
drawing down the forecast of all classes of deaths 
upon myself? 

Hazel: There are twenty thousand things you 
might lay down and I would give them no leave 
to annoy me. But I have no mind any strange 
family to be mixed through me, but to go my own 
road and to carry my own character. 

Mineog: I would say you to be very crabbed 



80 Coats 

to be making much of a small little mistake of the 
sort. 

Hazel: I will not have blood put in my veins 
that never rose up in them by birth. You to 
have put a slur maybe on the whole of my pos- 
terity for ever. That now is a thing out of 
measure. 

Mineog: It might be the Casserlys are as fair 
as the Hessians, and as well looking and as well 
reared. 

Hazel: There *s no one can know that. What 
place owns them? My tribe did n't come inside 
the province. Every generation was born and 
bred in this or in some neighbouring townland. 

Mineog: Sure you will be but yourself what- 
ever family may be laying claim to you. 

Hazel: Any person of the Casserlys to have 
done a wrong deed at any time, the neighbours 
would be watching and probing my own brood 
till they would see might the track of it break out 
in any way. It ran through our race to be hard 
tempered, from the Kanes that are very hot. 

Mineog: Why would the family of the Cas- 
serlys go doing wrong deeds more than another? 

Hazel: I would never forgive it, if it was the 
highest man in Connacht said it. 

Mineog: I tell you there to be any flaw in 
them, it would have worked itself out in yourself 
ere this. 



Coats 8 1 

Hazel: Putting on me the weight of a family 
I never knew or never heard the name of at all. 
It is that is killing me entirely. 

Mineog: Neither did I ever hear their name or 
if they ever lived in the world, or did any deed 
good or bad in it at all. 

Hazel: What made you drag them hither for 
to write them in my genealogies so? 

Mineog: I did not drag them hither 

Give me that paper. {Takes MS. and looks at 
it.) What would it be but a misprint? Hessian, 
Casserly. There does be great resemblance in 
the sound of a double S. 

Hazel: Whether or no, you have a great wrong 
done me ! The person I had most dependence on 
to be the most person to annoy me! If it was a 
man from the County Mayo I would n't see him 
treated that way! 

Mineog: Have sense now! What would sig- 
nify anything might be wrote about you, and the 
green scraws being over your head? 

Hazel: That 's the worst! I give you my 
oath I would not go miching from death or be in 
terror of the sharpness of his bones, and he coming 
as at the Flood to sweep the living world along 
with me, and leave no man on earth having pen- 
manship to handle my deeds, or to put his own 
skin on my story ! 

Mineog: Ah it 's likely the both of us will 



82 Coats 

be forgotten and our names along with us, and we 
out in the meadow of the dead. 

Hazel: I will not be forgotten ! I have poster- 
ity will put a good slab over me. Not like some 
would be left without a monument, unless it might 
be the rags of a cast waistcoat would be put on 
sticks in a barley garden, to go flapping at the 
thieves of the air. 

Mineog: Let the birds or the neighbours go 
screech after me and welcome, and I not in it to 
hear or to be annoyed. 

Hazel: Why would n't we hear? I 'm in dread 
it *s too much 1 11 hear, and you yourself sending 
such news to travel abroad, that there is blood 
in me I concealed through my lifetime! 

Mineog: What you are saying now has not 
the sense of reason. 

Hazel: Tom Mineog to say that of me, that 
was my trusty comrade and my friend, what at 
all will strangers be putting out about me? 

Mineog: Ah, what call have you to go la- 
menting as if you had lost all on this side of the 
sea! 

Hazel: You to have brought that annoyance 
on me, what would enemies be saying of me? 
That it was in my breed to be cracked or to have 
a thorn in the tongue. There 's a generation of 
families would be great with you, and behind you 
they would be backbiting you. 



Coats 83 

Mineog: They will not. You are of a family 
does n't know how to say a wrong word. 

Hazel: A rabbit mushroom they might say 
me to be, with no memory behind or around me ! 

Mineog: Not at all. The world knows you 
to be civil and brought up to mannerly ways. 

Hazel: They might say me to have been a 
foreigner or a Jew man ! 

Mineog: I can bear witness you have no such 
yellow look. And Hazel is a natural name. 

Hazel: It 's likely they '11 say I was a sheep- 
stealer or a tinker that went foraging around after 
food! 

Mineog: You that never put your hand on a 
rabbit burrow or stood before a magistrate or a 
judge! 

Hazel: They '11 put me down as a grabber that 
was ready to quench a widow's fire ! 

Mineog: Oh, where are you running to at all 
my dear man ! 

Hazel: And I not to be able at that time to 
rise up and to get satisfaction ! I to be wandering 
as a shadow and to see some schemer spilling 
out his lies! That would be the most grief in 
death! I to hit him a blow of my fist and he 
maybe not to feel it or to think it to be but a 
breeze of wind ! 

Mineog: You are going too far entirely ! 

Hazel: I to give out a strong curse on him and 



84 Coats 

on his posterity and his land. It would kill my 
heart if he would take it to be no human voice, but 
some vanity like the hissing of geese ! 

Mineog: I myself would recognise your voice, 
and you to be living or dead. 

Hazel: You say that now. But my ghost to 
come calling to you in the night time to rise up and 
to clear my character, you would run shivering to 
the priest as from some unnatural thing. You 
would call to him to come banish me with a 
Mass! 

Mineog: The Lord be between us and harm i 

Hazel: To have no power of revenge after 
death! My strength to go nourish weeds and 
grass ! A lie to be told and I living I could go lay 
my case before the courts. So I will too ! I '11 
silence you! I '11 learn you to have done with 
misspellings and with death notices! I '11 hinder 
you bringing in Casserlys ! I go take advice from 
the lawyer! (Goes towards door.) 

Mineog: I '11 go lay down my own case and the 
way that you have my life threatened ! 

Hazel: I '11 get justice and a hearing. The 
Judge will give in to my say ! 

Mineog: I that will put you under tail! I '11 
bind you over to quit prophesying ! 

Hazel: I '11 break the bail of the sun and 
moon before I '11 give you leave to go brand me 
with strange names the same as you would tar- 



Coats 85 

brand a sheep! I '11 put yourself and your 
Tribune under the law of libel ! 

Mineog: I '11 make a world's wonder of you! 
I '11 give plenty and enough to the Champion to 
fill out its windy pages that time ! 

Hazel: {At door.) I will lay my information 
before you will overtake me ! 

Mineog: {Seizing him.) I will lay my infor- 
mation against you for theft and you bringing 
away my coat ! 

Hazel: I have no intention of bringing it away ! 

Mineog: Is it that you will deny it? Don't 
I know that spot of grease on the sleeve? 

Hazel: Did I never carve a goose? Why 
would n't there be a spot of grease on my own 
sleeve? 

Mineog: Strip it off of you this minute! 

Hazel: Give me back my own coat, so ! 

Mineog: What are you talking about ! That 's 
a great wonder now. So it is not my own coat. 

Hazel: Strip it off before you will quit the room ! 

Mineog: I '11 be well pleased casting it off! 

Hazel: You will not cast it on the dust and the 
dirt of the floor! {Helps him.) Go easy now. 

That 's it {Takes it off gently and places 

it on chair.) 

Mineog: Give me now my own coat ! 

Hazel: {Struggling with it.) It fails me to 
get it off. 



86 Coats 

Mineog: What way did you get it on? 

Hazel: It is that it is made too narrow. 

Mineog: No, but yourself that has too much 
bulk. 

Hazel: {Struggling.) There now is a tear! 

Mineog: {Taking his arm.) Mind now, you '11 
have it destroyed. 

Hazel: Give me a hand, so. 

Mineog: {Helping him gently.) Have a care — 

it 's a bit tender in the seams give me here 

your hand — it is caught in the rip of the lining. 

John: {Coming in, puts pie on table.) Wait 
now, sir, till I '11 aid you to handle Mr. Hazel's 
coat. {Whips off coat, takes up other coat, hangs 
both on pegs.) The apple pie, Sir. 

{Hazel sits down, gasping and wiping his 
face. Mineog turns his back.) 

John: Is there anything after happening, Mr. 
Hazel? 

Hazel: There is not — unless some sort of a 
battle. 

John: Ah, what signifies? There to be more 
of battles in the world there would be less of wars. 
{He pushes Mineog 's chair to table.) 

Hazel: {After a pause.) Apple pie? 

Mineog: {Sitting down.) Indeed, I am not 
any way inclined for eating. 

{Takes plate. John stuffs a cushion into 
window pane and picks up MSS.) 



Coats 87 

John: Are these belonging to you, Mr. Mineog ? 

Mineog: Let you throw them on the coals of 
the fire, where we have no use for them presently. 

Hazel: {Stopping John and taking them.) 
Thursday is very near at hand. Two empty 
columns is a large space to go fill. 

Mineog: Indeed I am feeling no way fit to go 
writing columns. 

Hazel: {Putting his MS. in his pocket.) There is 
nothing ails them only to begin a good way after 
the start, and to stop before the finish. 

Mineog: {Putting his MS. in his pocket.) We '11 
do that. We can put such part of them as we do 
not need at this time back in the shelf of the press. 

Hazel: {Filling glasses and lifting his.) That 
it may be long before they will be needed ! 

Mineog: {Lifting glass.) That they may never 
be needed! 

Curtain 



DAMER'S GOLD 

A COMEDY IN TWO ACTS 



89 



Persons 
Patrick Kirwan 
Staff y Kirwan 
Delia Hessian 
Ralph Hessian 
Simon Niland 



CALLED DAMER 

HIS BROTHER 

HIS SISTER 

HER HUSBAND 

THEIR NEPHEW 



90 



DAMER'S GOLD 

Act I 

Scene: The kitchen in Darner's house. Outer 
door at back. Door leading to an inner room 
to right. A dresser ', a table, and a couple of 
chairs. An old coat and hat hanging on the 
wall. A knocking is heard at door at back. 
It is unlatched from outside. Delia comes in. 

Delia: {Looking round cautiously and going 
back to door.) You may come in, Staff y and 
Ralph. There would seem to be no person here. 

Staffy: Take care would Darner ask us to 
cross the threshold at all. I would not ask to 
go pushing on him, but to wait till he would call 
to us himself. He is not an easy led man. 

Delia: {Crossing and knocking at inner door.) 
He is not in it. He is likely slipped out unknownst. 

Ralph: Herself that thought to find him at the 
brink of death and nearing his last leap, after what 
happened him with the jennet. We heard tell 
of it as far as we were. 

Delia: What ailed him to go own a jennet, 
he that has means to stable a bay horse would 

91 



92 Darner's Gold 

set the windows rattling on the public road, and 
it sparkling over the flintstones after dark? 

Staff y: Sure he owns* no fourfooted beast only 
the dog abroad in its box. To make its way into 
the haggard the jennet did, the time it staggered 
him with a kick. To forage out some grazing it 
thought to do, beyond dirt and scutchgrass among 
the stones. Very cross jennets do be, as it is a 
cross man it met with. 

Delia: A queer sort of a brother he is. To go 
searching Ireland you wouldn't find queerer. 
But as soon as I got word what happened I bade 
Ralph to put the tacklings on the ass. We must 
have nature about us some way. There was 
silence between us long enough. 

Ralph: She was thinking it might be the cause 
of him getting his death sooner than God has it 
promised to him, and that it might turn his mind 
more friendly like towards us, he knowing us to 
be at hand for to settle out his burying. 

Delia: Why would n't it, and we being all the 
brothers and sisters ever he had, since Jane 
Niland, God rest her soul, went out last Little 
Christmas from the troubles and torments of the 
world. 

Staffy: There is nothing left of that marriage 
now, only one young lad is said to be mostly a fool. 

Delia: It is ourselves can bear witness to that, 
where he came into the house ere yesterday, hav- 



Darner's Gold 93 

ing no way of living, since death and misfortune 
scattered him, but as if he was left down out of 
the skies. 

Ralph: He has not, unless the pound piece 
the mother put into his hand at the last. It is 
much she had that itself. The time Tom Niland 
died from her, he didn't leave her hardly the 
cat. 

Staff y: The lad to have any wit around him 
he would have come travelling hither along with 
yourselves, to see would he knock any kindness 
out of Darner. 

Ralph: It is what herself was saying, it would 
be no advantage to him to be coming here at all, 
he being as he is half light, where there is nothing 
only will or wit could pick any profit out of Darner. 
She did not let on to him what side were we facing, 
and we travelling out from Loughtyshassy. 

Staffy: It is likely he will get tidings as good 
as yourself. It is said, and said largely, Darner 
has a full gallon jar of gold. 

Ralph: There is no one could lift it — God bless 
it — they were telling me. Filled up it is and 
brimmed to the very brink. 

Staffy: His heart and his soul gone into it. 
He is death on that gallon of gold. 

Delia: He would give leave to the poorhouse 
to bury him, if he could but put in his will they 
should leave it down with his bones. 



94 Darner's Gold 

Staffy: A man could live an easy life surely 
and that much being in the house. 

Delia: There is no more grasping man within 
the four walls of the world. A strange thing he 
turning to be so ugly and prone to misery, where 
he was reared along with myself. I have the 
first covetous person yet to meet I would like! 
I never would go thrusting after gold, I to get 
all Lord Clanricarde's estate. 

Ralph: She never would, only at a time she 
might have her own means spent and consumed. 

Staffy: The house is very racked beside what 
it was. The hungriest cabin in the whole ring 
of Connemara would not show out so empty and 
so bare. 

Delia: {Taking up a jug.) No sign in this 
vessel of anything that would leave a sign. I '11 
go bail he takes his tea in a black state, and the 
milk to be rotting in the churn. 

Ralph: {Handling a coat and hat hanging on a 
nail.) That 's a queer cut of a hat. That now 
should have been a good top-coat in its time. 

Delia: For pity's sake! That is the top-coat 
and the hat he used to be wearing and he riding 
his long-tailed pony to every racecourse from 
this to the Curragh of Kildare. A good class of 
cloth it should be to last out through seventeen 
years. 

Staffy: The time he was young and fundless 



Darner's Gold 95 

he had not a bad reaching hand. He never was 
thrifty but lavish till he came into the ownership 
of the land. It is as if his luck left him, he growing 
timid at the time he had means to lose. 

Delia: Every horse he would back at that time 
it would surely win all before it. I saw the people 
thronging him one time, taking him in their arms 
for joy, and the winnings coming into his hand. 
It is likely they ran out through the fingers as 
swift nearly as they flowed in. 

Staffy: He grew to be very dark and crabbed 
from the time of the father's death. His mind 
was on his halfpenny ever since. 

Delia: (Looking at dresser.) Spiders' webs 
heaped in ridges the same as windrows in a bleach 
of hay. What now is that there above on the 
upper shelf? 

Ralph: (Taking it from top shelf.) It is but 
a pack of cards. 

Staffy: They should maybe be the very same 
that brought him profit in his wild days. He 
always had a lucky hand. 

Delia: (Dusting them.) You would give your 
seven oaths the dust to have been gathering on 
them since the time of the Hebrews' Flood. I '11 
tell you now a thing to do. We being here before 
him in the house, why would n't we ready it and 
put some sort of face upon it, the way he would 
be in humour with us coming in. 



96 Darner's Gold 

Ralph: And the way he might incline to put 
into our hand some good promise or some gift. 

Delia: (Dusting.) I would wish no gift from 
any person at all, but that my mind is set at this 
time on a fleet of white goats and a guinea-hen are 
to be canted out from the Spanish woman at Lis- 
atuwna cross by reason of the hanging gale. 

Staffy: That was the way with you, Delia, 
from the time you could look out from the half- 
door, to be coveting pictures and fooleries, that 
would shape themselves in your mind. 

Delia: There is no sin coveting things are of 
no great use or profit, but would show out good 
and have some grandeur around them. Those 
goats now! Browsing on the blossoms of the 
bushes they would be, or the herbs that give out 
a sweet smell. Stir yourself, Staffy, and throw 
your eye on that turf beyond in the corner. It is 
that wet you could wring from it splashes and 
streams. Let you rise the ashes from the sods 
are on the hearth and redden them with a goose- 
wing, if there is a goosewing to be found. There is 
no greater beauty to be met with than the leaping 
of a little yellow flame. 

Staffy: In my opinion there will no pay-day 
come for this work, but only a thank-you job; 
a County Clare payment, ' God spare you the 
health !' 

Delia: Let you do it, Ralph so. (Takes pota- 



Darner's Gold 97 

toes from a sieve.) A roasted potato would be a 
nice thing to put before him, in the place of this 
old crust of a loaf. Put them in now around the 
sods, the way they will be crispy before him. 

Ralph: (Taking them.) And the way he will 
see you are a good housekeeper and will mind well 
anything he might think fit to give. 

Delia: (At clock.) I '11 set to the right time 
of day the two hands of the clock are pointing a 
full hour before the sun. Take, Staffy, that pair 
of shoes and lessen from them the clay of the land. 
That much of doing will not break your heart. 
He will be as proud as the fallen angels seeing 
the way we have all set out before him. 

(A harsh laugh is heard at inner door. They 
turn and see Darner watching them.) 

Ralph: Glory be to God ! 

Delia: It is Darner was within all the time ! 

Staffy: What are you talking about, Delia? 
It is Patrick you were meaning to say. 

Darner: Let her go on prattling out Darner 
to my face, as it is often she called it behind my 
shoulders. Darner the chandler, the miser got the 
spoil of the Danes, that was mocked at since 
the time of the Danes. I know well herself and 
the world have me christened with that nickname. 

Ralph: Ah, it is not to dispraise you they put 
it on you, but to show you out so wealthy and so 
rich. 



98 Darner's Gold 

Darner: I am thinking it is not love of my four 
bones brings you on this day under my thatch ? 

Staffy: We heard tell you were after being 
destroyed with a jennet. 

Darner: Picking up newses and tidings of me 
ye do be. It is short the delay was on you coming. 

Delia: And I after travelling through the most 
of the day on the head of you being wounded and 
hurt, thinking you to be grieving to see one of 
your own! And I in dread of my life stealing 
past your wicked dog. 

Darner: My joy he is, scaring you with his 
bark ! If it was n't for him you would have me 
clogged and tormented, coming in and bothering 
me every whole minute. 

Delia: There is no person in Ireland only 
yourself but would have as much welcome for me 
to-day as on the first day ever they saw me ! 

Darner: What 's that you are doing with my 
broom? 

Delia: To do away with the spider's webs I 
did, where the shelves were looped with them and 
smothered. Look at all that came off of that 
pack of cards. 

Darner: What call had you to do away with 
them, and they belonging to myself? Is it to 
bleed to death I should and I to get a tip of a 
billhook or a slasher? You and your vagaries 
to have left me bare, that I would be without 



Darner's Gold 99 

means to quench the blood, and it to rise up from 
my veins and to scatter on every side ! 

Delia: Is it that you are without e'er a rag, 
and that ancient coat to be hanging on the 
wall? 

Darner: The place swept to flitters! What is 
that man of yours doing and he handling my turf? 

Ralph: It was herself thought to be service- 
able to you, setting out the fuel that was full of 
dampness where it would get an air of the fire. 

Darner: To dry it is it? (Seizes sods and takes 
them from the hearth.) And what length would it 
be without being burned and consumed and it 
not to be wet putting it on? {Pours water over it.) 
And I after stacking it purposely in the corner 
where there does be a drip from the thatch. 

Ralph: She but thought it would be more 
answerable to you being dry. 

Darner: What way could I bear the expense 
of a fire on the hearth and it to leave smouldering 
and to break out into a blaze? A month's cutting 
maybe to go to ashes within three minutes, and 
into wisps of smoke. And the price of turf in this 
year gone wild out of measure, and it packed so 
roguish you could read the printed speeches on 
the paper through the sods you do be buying in 
the creel. 

Staff y: I was saying myself not to meddle with 
it. It is hurry is a worse friend than delay. 



ioo Darner's Gold 

Darner: Where did you get those spuds are 
roasting there upon the hearth ? 

Ralph: Herself that brought them out from 
the sieve, thinking to make ready your meal. 

Darner: My seed potatoes! Samples I got 
from the guardians and asked in the shops and in 
stores till I 'd gather enough to set a few ridges 
in the gardens would serve me through the length 
of the year ! 

Delia: Let you be satisfied so with your mouldy 
bit of loaf. {Breaks a bit from it and hands it to 
him.) 

Darner: Do not be breaking it so wasteful! 
The mice to have news there was as much as that 
of crumbs in the house, they would be running the 
same as chickens around the floor ! 

Ralph: Thinking to be comfortable to you 
she was, the way you would make us welcome 
from this out. 

Darner: Which of ye is after meddling with 
my clock? 

Delia: It was a full hour before its time. 

Darner: It to be beyond its time, would n't 
that save fire and candles sending me to my bed 
early in the night? Leave down those boots! 
{Takes them from Staff y.) Is it that you are 
wearing out the uppers with scraping at them and 
scratching ! Is it to rob me ye are come into this 
place? 



Darner's Gold 101 

Delia: I tell you we only came in getting word 
that you were done and dying. 

Darner: Ha! Is it to think I was dying ye 
did? Well, I am not. I am not so easy quenched. 
Strength and courage I have, to keep a fast grip 
of what I own. 

Delia: Let you not be talking that way! We 
are no grabbers and no thieves ! 

Darner: I have it in my mind that ye are. 
Very ravenous to run through my money ye are. 

Delia: The world knows I am not ravenous! 
I never gave my heart to silver or to gold but only 
to the thing it would bring in. But to hold from 
me the thing my heart is craving after, you might 
as well blacken the hearth. 

Darner: Striving to scare me out of my courage 
and my wits, the way I '11 give in to go making 
my will. 

Ralph: She would not be wishful you to do that 
the time your mind would be vexed. 

Darner: I '11 make it, sick or sound, if I have a 
mind to make it. 

Delia: Little thanks you '11 get from me if 
you make it or do not make it. That is the naked 
truth. 

Darner: The whole of ye think yourselves to 
be very managing and very wise ! 

Delia: Let you go will it so to an asylum for 
fools. 



102 Darner's Gold 

Darner: Why wouldn't I? It is in the asylums 
all the sense is these times. There is only the 
fools left outside. 

Delia: You to bestow it outside of your own 
kindred for to benefit and comfort your soul, all 
the world will say it is that you had it gathered 
together by fraud. 

Staffy: Do not be annoying him now. 

Delia: I will not. But the time he will be 
lying under the flagstone, it is holly rods and 
brambles will spring up from out of his thorny 
heart. 

Darner: A hasty, cranky woman in the house 
is worse than you to lay your hand upon red coals ! 
I know well your tongue that is as sharp as the 
sickle of the moon ! 

Delia: The character you will leave after you 
will be worse out and out than Herod's ! 

Darner: The devil upon the winds she is ! That 
one was born into the world having the use of the 
bow and arrows ! 

Delia: You not to give fair play to your own, 
it is a pitiful ghost will appear in your image, 
questing and craving our prayers ! 

Darner: I know well what is your aim and your 
drift! 

Delia: I say any man has a right to give thanks 
to the heavens, and he having decent people to will 
his means to, in place of people having no call to it. 



Darner's Gold 103 

Darner: Whoever I '11 will it to will have call 
to it! 

Delia: Or to part with it to low people and to 
mean people, and you having it to give. 

Darner: Having it to give is it? Do you see 
that lock on the door? 

Delia: I do see it and have eyes to see it. 

Darner: Can you make any guess what is 
inside of it? 

Delia: It is likely it is what there is so much 
talk about, your own full gallon of gold. 

{Ralph takes off his hat.) 

Darner: Lay now your eye to that lock hole. 

Ralph: {Looking through keyhole.) It is all 
dusky within. It fails me to see any shining 
thing. {Staffy and Delia put their eyes to key- 
hole but draw back disappointed.) 

Darner: If you cannot see it, try can you get 
the smell of it. Take a good draw of it now; 
lay your head along the hinges of the door. 
So now ye may quit and scamper out of this, 
the whole throng of ye, robbers and hangmen 
and bankbreakers, bargers and bad characters, 
and you may believe me telling you that is the 
nearest ye ever will come to my gold ! {He bangs 
back into room locking door after him.) 

Delia: He has no more nature than the brutes 
of the field, hunting and howling after us. 

Staffy: Yourself that rose him out of his wits 



104 Darner's Gold 

and his senses. We will sup sorrow for this day's 
work where he will put curses after us. It is 
best for us go back to my place. It may be to- 
morrow that his anger will be cured up. 

Ralph: I thought it was to lay him out with cand- 
les we were brought here. I declare I came nearer 
furnishing out a corpse myself with the start I got. 
Delia: There is no dread on me. When he 
gets in humour I will tackle up again to him. 
It is too far I came to be facing back to Loughty- 
shassy and I fasting from the price of my goats! 
Little collars I was thinking to buckle around their 
neck the same as a lady's lapdog, and maybe so 
far as a small clear-sounding bell. 

{They go out, Darner comes back. He puts 
on clock, rakes out fire, picks up pota- 
toes and puts them back in sieve, takes 
bread into his room. There is a knock 
at the door. Then it is cautiously opened 
and Simon Niland comes in, and stands 
near the hearth. Darner comes back 
and sees him.) 
Darner: What are you looking for? 
Simon: For what I won't get seemingly, that 
is a welcome. 

Darner: Maybe it 's for fists you are looking? 
Simon: It is not, before I will get my rest. I 
could n't box to-night if I was the Queen of 
England. 



Darner's Gold 105 

Darner: Have you any traffic with that con- 
gregation is after going out? 

Simon: I seen no person good or bad, but a 
dog and it on the chain. 

Darner: You to have in you any of the breed 
of the Kirwans that is my own, I 'd rise the tongs 
and pitch you out from the door ! 

Simon: I suppose you would not begrudge me 
to rest myself for a while. {Sits down.) 

Darner: I '11 give leave to no strolling vagabond 
to sit in any place at all. 

Simon: All right so. {Tosses a coin he takes 
from his pocket, tied in a spotted handkerchief.) 

Darner: What 's that you 're doing? 

Simon: Pitching a coin I was to see would it 
bid me go west or east. 

Darner: Go toss outside so. 

Simon: {Stooping and groping.) I will after 
I will find it. 

Darner: Hurry on now. 

Simon: Wait till I '11 kindle a match. {Lights 
one and picks up coin.) 

Darner: What is that in your hand? 

Simon: You should know. 

Darner: Is it gold it is? 

Simon: It is all I have of means in the world. 
I never handled a coin before it, but my bite to be 
given me and my bed. 

Darner: You '11 mind it well if you have sense. 



106 Darner's Gold 

Simon: It is towards the east it bade me go. 
I '11 travel as far as the races of Knockbarron 
to-morrow. 

Darner: You '11 be apt to lose it going to races. 

Simon: I '11 go bet with it, and see what way 
will it turn out. 

Darner: You to set all you own upon a horse 
that might fail at the leaps! It is a very foolish 
thing doing that. 

Simon: It might not. Some have luck and 
are born lucky and more have run through their 
luck. If I lose it, it is lost. It would not keep me 
long anyway. I to win, I will have more and 
plenty. 

Darner: You will surely lose it. 

Simon: If I do I have nothing to get or to fall 
back on. It is some other one must take my 
charges. 

Darner: A great pity to go lose a gold sovereign 
to some schemer you never saw before. 

Simon: Sure you must take some risk. You 
cannot put your hands around the world. 

Darner: It to be swept by a trick of the loop 
man! 

Simon: It is not with that class I will make free. 

Darner: To go lose the whole of it in one second 
of time ! 

Simon: I will make four divides of it. 

Darner: To go change it into silver and into 



Darners Gold 107 

copper! That would be the most pity in the 
world. 

Simon: I '11 chance it all upon the one jock 

so. 

Darner: Gold! Believe me it is a good thing 
to hold and a very heartbreak the time it is lost. 
{Takes it in his hand.) Pure gold! There is not 
a thing to be got with it as worthy as what it is 
itself! There is no comfort in any place and it 
not in it. The Queers image on it and her crown. 
Solid between the fingers; weighty in the palm of 
the hand; as beautiful as ever I saw. 

Simon: It is likely it is the same nearly as any 
other one. 

Darner: Gold! My darling it is! From the 
hollows of the world to the heights of the world 
there is no grander thing to be found. My bone 
and my marrow! Let me have the full of my 
arms of it and I '11 not ask the flowers of field or 
fallow or the dancing of the Easter sun! 

Simon: I am thinking you should be Darner. 
I heard said Darner has a full crock of gold. 

Darner: He has not ! He has not ! 

Simon: That is what the world says anyway. 
I heard it as far as the seaside. 

Darner: I wish to my God it was true ! 

Simon: Full and brimming to the brink. That 
is the way it was told. 

Darner: It is not full! It is not! Whisper 



108 Darner's Gold 

now. It is many a time I thought it to be full, 
full at last, full at last ! 

Simon: And it was n't after? 

Darner: To take it and to shake it I do. It is 
often I gave myself a promise the time there will 
be no sound from it, I will give in to nourish my- 
self, I will rise out of misery. But every time I will 
try it, I will hear a little clatter that tells me there 
is some space left; some small little hole or gap. 

Simon: What signifies that when you have so 
much in it? 

Darner: Weightier it gets and weightier, but 
there will always be that little sound. I thought 
to stop it one time, putting in a fistful of hayseed ; 
but I felt in my heart that was not dealing fair 
and honest with myself, and I rose up and shook 
it out again, rising up from my bed in the night 
time. I near got my death with the cold and the 
draught fell on me doing that. 

Simon: It is best for me be going on where I 
might find my bed, 

Darner: Hearken now. I am old and the long 
road behind me. You are young and in your 
strength. It is you is rich, it is I myself that is 
poor. You know well, you to get the offer, you 
would not change your lot with my own. 

Simon: I suppose I might not. I'd as lief 
keep my countenance and my run. 

Darner: Is n't it a great pity there to be that 



Darners Gold 109 

hollow within in my gallon, and the little coin 
that would likely just fill it up, to be going out 
of the house? 

Simon: Is it that you are asking it of me? 

Darner: You might never find so good a way 
to open Heaven to yourself with a charity. To be 
bringing peace to an old man that has not long 
to live in the world ! You would n't think now 
how quiet I would sleep, and the good dreams 
would be going through me, and that gallon jar 
to be full and to make no sound the time I would 
roll it on the floor. That would be a great deed 
for one little pound piece to do ! 

Simon: 1 11 toss you for it. 

Darner: I would not dare put anything at all 
upon a chance. 

Simon: Leave it alone so. {Turns away.) 

Darner: {Seizing him.) It would make such 
a good appearance in the little gap ! 

Simon: Head or harp? 

Darner: No, I 'm in dread I might lose. 

Simon: Take your chance or leave it. 

Darner: I to lose, you may kill me on the 
moment! My heart is driven down in the sole 
of my shoe ! 

Simon: That is poor courage. 

Darner: There is some shiver forewarning me 
I will lose! I made a strong oath I never would 
give in again to try any sort of chance. 



no Darner's Gold 

Simon: You did n't make it but with yourself. 

Darner: It was through my luck leaving me I 
swore against betting and gaming. 

Simon: It might turn back fresh and hearty 
where you gave it so long a rest. 

Darner: Well — maybe 

Simon: Here now. 

Darner: I dare not. 

Simon: {Going to door.) I '11 make my bet 
so according to a dream I had. It is on a red 
horse I will put it to-morrow. 

Darner: No — stop — wait a minute. 

Simon: I '11 win surely following my dream. 

Darner: I might not lose. 

Simon: I 'm in dread of that. All turns to 
the man is rich. 

Darner: 1 11 chance it ! 

Simon: You said no and I '11 take no. 

Darner: You cannot go back of your word. 

Simon: Let me go out from you tempting me. 

Darner: {Seizing him.) Heads! I say heads! 

Simon: Harps it is. I win. 

Darner: My bitter grief ! Ochone! 

Simon: I '11 toss you for another. 

Darner: You will not. What 's tosses? Look 
at here what is put in my way! {Holds up pack 
of cards.) 

Simon: Where 's the stakes? 

Darner: Wait a second. {Goes into room.) 



Darner's Gold in 

Simon: Hurry on or I won't stop. 

Darner: Let you not stir out of that! {Comes 
back and throws money on table.) 

Simon: Come on so. {Shuffles cards.) 

Darner: Give me the pack. {Cuts.) I did n't 
feel a card between my fingers this seven and a 
half-score years ! 

Simon: Spades are trumps. 

Darner: {Lighting candle.) I '11 win it back! 
I won't begrudge spending a penny candle, no, or 
two penny candles! I '11 play you to the brink 
of day ! 

Curtain 



Act II 

The next morning. The same kitchen. Simon 
Niland is lying asleep on the hearth. Ralph 
and Staff y are looking at him. 

Staff y: Who is it at all is in it? 

Ralph: Who would it be but Simon Niland, 
that is come following after us. 

Staffy: Stretched and sleeping all the same as 
if there was a pin of slumber in his hair, as in the 
early times of the world. The day passing with- 
out anything doing. That one will never win to a 
fortune. 

Ralph: It would be as well for ourselves maybe 
he not to be too great with Darner. 

Staffy: Will Delia make any headway I 
wonder. She had good courage to go face him, 
and he abroad on the land, sitting stooped on the 
bent body of a bush. 

Ralph: I wonder what way did that lad make 
his way into this place. Wait now till I '11 waken 
and question him. (Shakes Simon.) 

Simon: (Drowsily.) Who is that stirring me? 

Ralph: Rouse yourself up now. 

112 



Darner's Gold 113 

Simon: Do not be rousing me, where I am 
striving to catch a hold of the tail of my last dream. 

Staff y: Is it seeking for a share of Darner's 
wealth you are come? 

Simon: I never asked and never looked for it. 

Staffy: You are going the wrong road to reach 
to it. 

Simon: A bald cat there was in the dream, was 
keeping watch over jewelleries in a cave. 

Staffy: No person at all would stretch out his 
hand to a lad would be rambling and walking the 
world, and it in its darkness and sleep, and be 
drowsing and miching from labour through the 
hours the sun has command of. 

Delia: {At the door.) Is it that ye are within, 
Staffy and Ralph? 

Ralph: We are, and another along with us. 

Delia: Put him out the door! 

Ralph: Ah, there 's no danger of him coming 
around Darner. He is simple and has queer talk 
too. 

Delia: Put him out I say ! {Pushes Simon to 
door.) Let him drowse out the day in the car shed ! 
I tell you Darner is at hand ! 

Ralph: Has he the frown on him yet? 

Staffy: Did his anger anyway cool down? 

Delia: He is coming I say. I am partly in 
dread of him. I am afeard and affrighted! 

Ralph: He should be in terrible rages so. 



ii4 Darners Gold 

There was no dread on you yesterday, and he 
cursing and roaring the way he was. 

Delia: He is mad this time out and out. Wait 
now till you '11 see ! 

{She goes behind dresser. Darner comes to 
the door. Staffy goes behind a chair. 
Ralph seizes a broom.) 

Darner: {A t door.) Are you acquainted with any 
person, Ralph Hessian, is in need of a savage dog? 

Staffy: Is it that you are about to part Jubair 
your dog? 

Darner: I have no use for him presently. 

Staffy: Is it that you are without dread of 
robbers coming for to knock in your skull with 
a stone? Or maybe out in the night it is to burn 
you out of the house they would. 

Darner: What signifies, what signifies? All 
must die, all must die. The longest person that 
will live in the world, he is bound to go in the heel. 
Life is a long road to travel and a hard rough track 
under the feet. 

Staffy: Mike Merrick the huckster has an 
apple garden bought against the harvest. He 
should likely be seeking for a dog. There do be 
little lads passing to the school. 

Darner: He might want him, he might want 
him. {He leans upon half-door.) 

Staffy: Is it that you are tired and wore out 
carrying the load of your wealth? 



Darner's Gold 115 

Darner: It is a bad load surely. It was the 
love of money destroyed Buonaparte where he 
went robbing a church, without the men of learn- 
ing are telling lies. 

Staffy: I would never go so far as robbery, but 
to bid it welcome I would, and it coming fair and 
easy into my hand. 

Darner: There was a king out in Foreign went 
astray through the same sin. His people that 
made a mockery of him after his death, rilling up 
his jaws with rendered gold. Believe me, any 
person goes coveting after riches puts himself under 
a bad master. 

Staffy: That is a master I 'd be willing to 
engage with, he to give me my victuals and my 
ease. 

Darner: In my opinion it was to keep tempta- 
tion from our path the gold of the world was 
covered under rocks and in the depths of the 
streams. Believe me it is best leave it where it 
is, and not to meddle with the Almighty. 

Staffy: You 'd be best without it. It is the 
weight of it is bowing you to your grave. When 
things are vexing your mind and you are trouble 
minded they '11 be going through your head in the 
night time. There is a big shift and a great change 
in you since yesterday. There is not the half of 
you in it. You have the cut of the misfortune. 

Darner: I am under misfortune indeed. 



n6 Darner's Gold 

Staff y: Give over now your load to myself 
before the coming of the dusk. The way you are 
there '11 be nothing left of you within three days. 
There is no way with you but death. 

Delia: {To Ralph.) Let you raise your voice 
now, and come around him on my own behalf. 

Ralph: It is what herself is saying, you to be 
quitting the world as it seems, it is as good for you 
make over to her your crock of gold. 

Darner: I would not wish, for all the glories of 
Ireland, to leave temptation in the path of my 
own sister or my kin, or to twist a gad for their 
neck. 

Delia: {To Ralph.) Tell him I '11 chance it. 

Darner: At the time of the judgment of the 
mountain, when the sun and moon will be all one 
with two blackberries, it is not being pampered 
with plenty will serve you, beside being great with 
the angels! 

Delia: {Shrinking back.) I would as soon 
nearly not get it at all, where it might bring me to 
the wretched state of Darner ! {Dog heard barking. ) 

Darner: I '11 go bring my poor Jubair out of 
this. A great sin and a great pity to be losing 
provision with a dog, and the image of the saints 
maybe to be going hungry and bare. How do I 
know what troop might be bearing witness against 
me before the gate of heaven? To be cherishing 
a ravenous beast might be setting his teeth in their 



Darner's Gold 117 

limbs! To give charity to the poor is the best 
religion in Ireland. Didn't our Lord Himself 
go beg through three and thirty years? (He goes.) 

Delia: (Coming forward.) Will you believe 
me now telling you he is gone unsteady in the 
head? 

Staffy: I see no other sign. He is a gone man 
surely. His understanding warped and turned 
backward. To see him blighted the way he is 
would stir the heart of a stone. 

Ralph: He surely got some vision or some 
warning, or there lit on him a fit or a stroke. 

Staffy: Twice a child and only once a man. 
He is turned to be innocent with age. 

Ralph: It would be a bad thing he to meet 
with his death unknown to us. 

Delia: It would be worse again he that is gone 
out of his latitude to be brought away to the 
asylum. 

Ralph: I don't know. 

Delia: But I know. He to die, and to make 
no will, it is ourselves, by rule and by right, that 
would lay claim to his wealth. 

Staffy: So we could do that, and he to come 
to his end in the bad place, God save the mark! 

Delia: Would you say there would be no fear 
the Government might stretch out and take 
charge of it, saying him to be outside of his reason ? 

Ralph: That would be the worst of all. We 



n8 Darner's Gold 

to be forced to hire an attorney against them, till 
we would break one another at law. 

Delia: He to be stopping here, and being light 
in the brain, it is likely some thief travelling the 
road might break his way in and sweep all. 

Ralph: It would be right for us keep some sort 
of a watch on it. 

Staffy: What way would we be sitting here 
watching it, the same as a hen on a pebble of flint, 
through a quarter or it might be three quarters 
of a year? He might drag for a good while yet, 
and live and linger into old days. 

Delia: To take some cross turn he might, and 
to come at us violent and maybe tear the flesh 
from our bones. 

Staffy: It is best for us do nothing so, but to 
leave it to the foreknowledge of God. 

Delia: There is but the one thing to do. To 
bring it away out of this and to lodge it within 
in my own house. We can settle out a place under 
the hearth. 

Staffy: We can make a right division of it at 
such time as the end will come. 

Ralph: What way now will we bring away the 
crock? 

Delia: Let you go outside and be watching the 
road while Staffy will be bringing out the gold. 

Staffy: Ah, I 'm not so limber as what Ralph is. 
There does be giddiness and delay in my feet. It 



Darner's Gold 119 

might fail me to heave it to a hiding place and to 
bring it away unknownst. 

Delia: Let you go out so and be keeping a 
watch, and Ralph will put it on the ass-car under 
sacks. 

Ralph: Do it you. I am not of his own kindred 
and his family. Any person to get a sketch of me 
bringing it away they might nearly take myself 
to be a thief. 

Delia: We are doing but what is fair and is 
right. 

Ralph: Maybe so. But any neighbour to be 
questioning me, it might be hard put a skin on 
the story. 

Delia: There is no person to do it but the one. 
{Calls from the door.) Come in here from the shed, 
Simon Niland, if the sluggishness is banished from 
your eyesight and from your limbs. 

Simon: {At door.) I was thinking to go travel 
my road. 

Delia: Have you any desire to reach out your 
hand for to save a mortal life? 

Simon: {Coming in.) Whose life is that ? 

Staffy: The man of this house that is your 
uncle and is owner of wealth closed up in a jar. 
We now being wittier than himself, that has lost 
his wits, have our mind made up to bring it away. 

Simon: Outside of his knowledge is it? 

Staffy: It will be safe and well minded and 



120 Darner's Gold 

lodged in loyal keeping, it being no profit to him 
that is at this time shook and blighted, but only 
a danger to his days. 

Delia: The seven senses to be going astray on 
him, what would ail any tramp or neuk would be 
passing the road, not to rob him and to lay him 
stone dead? 

Staff y: Go in now and bring out from the room 
and to such place as we will command, that gallon 
jar of gold. 

Ralph: It being certain it will be brought 
away from him, it is best it to be kept in the family, 
and not to go nourishing lawyers or thieves. 

Simon: Is it to steal it I should? 

Staffy: What way will it be stealing, and the 
whole of us to be looking on at your deed? 

Simon: Ah, what call have I to do that much 
and maybe put myself in danger of the judge, for 
the sake of a man is without sense. 

Delia: Let you do it for my own sake so. You 
heard me giving out news on yesterday of the 
white goats are on the bounds of being sold. 
The neighbours will give me no more credit, where 
they loaned me the price of a crested side car was 
auctioned out at a quality sale. 

Ralph: Picking the eyes out of my own head 
they are, to pay the little bills they have against 
her. 

Delia: I am no way greedy, I would ask neither 



Darner's Gold 121 

food or bite, I would not begrudge turning Sunday 
into Friday if I could but get my heart's desire. 
Such a thing now as a guinea-hen would be bring- 
ing fashion to the door, throwing it a handful of 
yellow meal, and it in its speckled plumage giving 
out its foreign call ! 

Simon: I have no mind to be brought within 
the power of the law. 

Delia: You that are near in blood to refuse me 
so small an asking, what chance would I have 
sending requests to Heaven that is beyond the 
height of the clouds ! {Weeps.) 

Staffy: That 's the way with them that are 
reared poor, they are the hardest after to humour, 
striving to bring everything to their own way. 
But there 's a class of people in the world would n't 
do a hand's turn, no more than the bird upon the 
tree. 

Ralph: I wonder you not to give in to us, 
when all the world knows God formed young 
people for to be giving aid to elder people, and 
beyond all to them that are near to them in blood. 

Staffy: Look now, Simon, let you be said and 
led by me. You having no great share of wisdom 
we are wishful to make a snug man of you and to 
put you on a right road. Go in now and you will 
not be kept out of your own profit and your share, 
and a harbour of plenty beyond all. 

Simon: It might be guarded by a serpent in a 



122 Darner's Gold 

tree, or by unnatural things would be in the simil- 
itude of cats. 

Staffy: Ah, that class is done away with this 
good while. 

Ralph: There is no person having sense, but 
would take means, by hook or by crook, to make 
his pocket stiff and he to be given his fair chance* 
It is to save you from starvation we are wishful 
to do, as much as to bring profit to ourselves. 

Staffy: You not to follow our say you will be 
brought to burn green ferns to boil your victuals, 
or to devour the berries of the bush. 

Simon: I would not wish a head to follow me 
and leap up on the table and wrestle me, or to 
drink against me with its gory mouth. 

Staffy: You that have not the substance of a 
crane's marrow, to go shrink from so small a 
bidding, let you go on the shaughraun or to the 
workhouse, where you would not take our advice. 

Simon: I '11 go do your bidding so. I will go 
bring out the crock. 

Staffy: There is my whiteheaded boy! I '11 
keep a watch, the way Darner will not steal in on 
us without warning. 

Ralph: He should have the key in some secret 
place. It is best for you give the lock a blow of 
your foot. 

Simon: I '11 do that. (He gives door a kick. 
It opens easily.) 



Darner's Gold 123 

Delia: Was I right now saying Darner is 
turned innocent? Sure the door was not locked 
at all. 

Simon: {Dragging out jar.) Here it is now. 

Ralph: So it is and no mistake. 

Staffy: There should be great weight in it. 

Ralph: I am in dread it might work a hole down 
through the timber of the car. 

Delia: Why would n't we open it here? It 
would be handier bringing it away in small 
divides. 

Ralph: The way we would make sure of getting 
our own share at the last. 

Delia: Let you draw out the cork from it. 

Ralph: I don't know can I lift it. (Stoops 
and lifts it easily.) The Lord protect and save 
us ! There is no weight in it at all ! 

Staffy: (Seizing and shaking it.) Not a one 
penny in it but clean empty. That beats all. 

Delia: It is with banknotes it is stuffed that 
are deaf and do be giving out no sound. (She 
pokes in a knitting pin.) Nothing in it at all, but 
as bare as the canopy of heaven ! 

Ralph: There being nothing within in it, 
where now is the gold? 

Staffy: Some person should have made away 
with it. 

Delia: Some robber or some great rogue. A 
terrible thing such ruffians to be around in the 



124 Darner's Gold 

world! To turn and rob a poor man of all he 
had spared and had earned. 

Staffy: They have done him a great wrong 
surely, taking from him all he had of comfort in 
his life. 

Ralph: My grief it is there being no more 
hangings for thieves, that are worse again than 
murderers that might do their deed out of heat. 
It is thieving is the last crime. 

Staffy: We to lay our hand on that vagabond 
we 11 give him cruelty will force him to Christian 
habits. 

Ralph: Take care might he be nearer than 
what you think ! (He points at Simon. All look 
at him.) 

Staffy: Sure enough it is with himself only we 
found him on the hearth this morning. 

Delia: He hasn't hardly the intellect to be 
the thief. 

Simon: I tell you I never since the day I was born 
could be charged with the weight of a brass pin ! 

Staffy: It is to Darner, my fine boy, you will 
have to make out your case. 

Simon: So I will make it out. Where now is 
Darner? 

Staffy: He is gone down the road, where he 
brought away Jubair the dog. 

Simon: What are you saying? The dog gone 
is it? (Goes to door.) 



Darner's Gold 125 

Ralph: {Taking hold of him.) What makes you 
go out in such a hurry? 

Simon: What is that to you? 

Delia: What cause has he to be making a run? 

Simon: Let me mind my own business. 

Staffy: It is maybe our own business. 

Simon: To make a search I must in that dog's 
kennel of straw. 

Delia: Go out, Ralph, till you will bring it in. 

(Ralph goes out.) 

Staffy: (Seizing him.) A man to go rush out 
headlong and money after being stolen, I have no 
mind to let him make his escape. 

Delia: If you are honest let you stop within 
and not to put a bad appearance upon yourself 
making off. 

Simon: Let me out ! I tell you I have a thing 
concealed in the box. 

Staffy: A strange place to go hiding things 
and a queer story altogether. 

Delia: Do not let go your hold. He to go out 
into the street, he has the wide world before him. 

Ralph: (Dragging kennel in.) Here now is 
the box. 

Simon: (Breaking away and searching it.) 
Where at all is it vanished? 

Staffy: It is lies he was telling. There is noth- 
ing at all within in it only a wisp of barley straw. 

Simon: Where at all is it? 



126 Darner's Gold 

Staff y: What is it is gone from you? 

Simon: Not a one pound left ! 

Delia: Why would you look to find coins of 
money down in Jubair's bed ? 

Simon: It is there I hid it. 

Staff y: What is it you hid? 

Simon: All that was in the crock and that I 
took from it. Where now is my bag of gold? 

Staff y: Do you hear what he is after saying? 

Ralph: A lad of that sort will not be safe but 
in the gaol. Let us give him into the grip of the 
law. 

Delia: No, but let the man owned it do that. 

Staffy: So he can task him with it, and he 
drawing to the door. 

Delia: {Going to it.) It is time for you, Patrick, 
come in. 

{Darner comes in dragging a sack.) 

Ralph: You are after being robbed and left bare. 

Delia: Not a one penny left of all you have 
cast into its mouth. 

Ralph: Herself made a prophecy you would be 
robbed with the weakening of your wits, and sure 
enough it has come about. 

Delia: Not a tint of it left. What now do you 
say, hearing that? 

Darner: {Sitting down by the hearth and laying 
down sack.) If it should go it must go. That was 
allotted to me in the skies. 



Darner's Gold 127 

Delia: Is it that you had knowledge ere this 
of it being swept and lost? 

Darner: If I had not, why would I have been 
setting my mind upon eternity and striving to 
bring to mind a few prayers? And to have parted 
with my wicked dog? 

Delia: Let you turn around till you will see 
before you the man that is the robber and the thief ! 

Simon: Thief yourself! You that had a plan 
made up to bring it away. 

Darner: Delia, Delia, what was I laying down 
a while ago? It is the love of riches has twisted 
your heart and your mind. 

Delia: Is it that you are contented to be made 
this one's prey? 

Darner: It was foretold for me. I to go stint 
the body till I near put myself to death without 
the Lord calling on me, and to lose every whole 
pound after in one night's card playing. 

Delia: Is it at cards you lost it? 

Darner: With that same pack of cards you 
laid out under my hand, I lost all I had gathered 
to that one. 

Staff y: Well, there is nothing so certain in the 
world as the running of a fool to a fool. 

Delia: Is it taking that lad you are to be a 
fool? I thinking him to be as simple as you *d see 
in the world, and he putting bread upon his own 
butter as we slept ! 



128 Darner's Gold 

Ralph: We to have known all then we know 
now, we need not have wasted on him our advice. 

Darner: Give me, boy, one answer. What in 
the world wide put venture into you that made you 
go face the dog? 

Simon: Ah, what venture? And he being as 
he is without teeth? 

Darner: You know that, what no one in the 
parish or out of it ever found out till now! You 
should have put your hand in his jaw to know that 
much! A right lad you are and a lucky lad. I 
would nearly wish you of my own blood and of 
my race. 

Delia: Of your own blood is it? 

Darner: That is what I would wish. 

Delia: Is it that you are taking Simon Niland 
to be a stranger? 

Darner: What Simon Niland? 

Delia: Your own nephew and only son to your 
sister Sarah. 

Darner: Do you tell me so! What way did it 
fail me to recognise that, and he having daring 
and spirit the same as used to be rising up in 
myself in my early time? 

Delia: He was born the very year of you com- 
ing into possession of this place. 

Darner: The same year my luck turned against 
me, and every horse I would back would get the 
staggers on the course, or would fail to rise at the 



Darner's Gold 129 

leaps. All the strength of fortune went from me 
at that time, it is into himself it flowed and ran. 
The dead spit and image of myself he is. Stop 
with me here through the winter season and through 
the summer season ! You to be in the house it is 
not an unlucky house will be in it. The Royalty of 
England and of Spain cannot touch upon yourself. 
I am prouder of you than if you wrote the wars of 
Homer or put down Turgesius of the Danes ! You 
are a lad that can't be beat. It is you are the 
Lamb of Luck! 

Staffy: What call has he or any of us to be 
stopping under Darner's roof and he owning but 
the four walls presently and a poor little valley 
of land? 

Ralph: There is nothing worth while in his 
keeping, and all he had gathered after being robbed. 

Darner: Is that what you are saying? Well, I 
am not so easy robbed as you think! {Takes bag 
from the sack and shakes it.) Is that what you call 
being robbed ? 

Simon: That is my treasure and my bag ! 

Staffy: I thought it was after being brought 
away from the two of you. 

Darner: You are out of it! It is Jubair did 
that much for me. Jubair, my darling, it is to- 
night I '11 bring him back to the house! It is not 
in the box he will be any more but alongside the 
warmth of the hearth. The time I went unloosing 



130 Darner's Gold 

his chain, did n't he scrape with his paw till he 
showed me all I had lost hid in under the straw, and 
it in a spotted bag ! {Opens and pours out money.) 

Simon: It is as well for you have it back where 
it stopped so short with myself. 

Darner: Is it that I would keep it from you 
where it was won fair? It is a rogue of a man 
would do that. Where would be the use, and I 
knowing you could win it back from me at your 
will, and the five trumps coming into your hand? 
It is to share it we will and share alike, so long as 
it will not give out ! 

Delia: A little handsel to myself would do the 
both of you no harm at all. 

Darner: Delia, my darling, I '11 go as far as 
that on this day of wonders. I '11 handsel you 
and welcome. I '11 bestow on you the empty jar. 
{Gives it to her.) 

Delia: I '11 take it. I '11 let on it to be weighty 
and I facing back into Loughtyshassy. 

Ralph: The neighbours seeing it and taking 
you to be his heir you might come to your goats yet. 

Delia: Ah, what *s goats and what is guinea- 
hens? Did ever you see yoked horses in a coach, 
their skin shining out like shells, rising their steps 
in tune the same as a patrol of police? There are 
peacocks on the lawns of Lough Cutra they were 
telling me, having each of them a hundred eyes. 
{Goes to door.) 



Darner's Gold 131 

Simon: (Putting his hand on the jar.) I don't 
know. (To Darner) It might be a nice thing for 
the two of us to start gathering the full of it again. 

Darner: Not a fear of me. Where heaping 
and hoarding that much has my years withered 
and blighted up to this, it is not to storing treasure 
in any vessel at all I will give the latter end of my 
days, or to working the skin off my bones. Give 
me here that coat. (Puts it on.) If I was tossed 
and racked a while ago I '11 show out good from 
this out. Come on now, out of this, till we '11 
face to the races of Loughrea and of Knock- 
barron. I was miserable and starved long enough. 
(Puts on hat.) I 'm thinking as long as I '11 be 
living I '11 take my view of the world, for it 's long 
I '11 be lying when my eyes are closed and seeing 
nothing at all ! 

(He seizes a handful of gold and puts it in 
Simon* s pocket and another in his own. 
They turn towards the door.) 

Curtain 



McDONOUGH'S WIFE 



133 



Persons 

McDonough, a piper. 
First Hag. 
Second Hag. 



134 



McDONOUGH'S WIFE 

Scene: A very poor room in Galway with outer and 
inner door. Noises of a fair outside. A Hag 
sitting by the fire. Another standing by outer 
door. 

First Hag: Is there e'er a sign of McDonough 
to be coming? 

Second Hag: There is not. There were two 
or three asking for him, wanting him to bring the 
pipes to some spree-house at the time the fair 
will be at an end. 

First Hag: A great wonder he not to have 
come, and this the fair day of Galway. 

Second Hag: He not to come ere evening, the 
woman that is dead must go to her burying 
without one to follow her, or any friend at all to 
flatten the green scraws above her head. 

First Hag: Is there no neighbour at all will do 
that much, and she being gone out of the world? 

Second Hag: There is not. You said to ask 
Pat Marlborough, and I asked him, and he said 
there were plenty of decent women and of well- 
reared women in Galway he would follow and wel- 
come the day they would die, without paying that 

135 



136 McDonough's Wife 

respect to one not belonging to the district, or 
that the town got no good account of the time she 
came. 

First Hag: Did you do as I bade you, asking 
Cross Ford to send in a couple of the boys she has? 

Second Hag: What a fool I 'd be asking her! 
I laid down to her the way it was. McDonough's 
wife to be dead, and he far out in the country, and 
no one belonging to her to so much as lift the coffin 
over the threshold of the door. 

First Hag: What did she say hearing that? 

Second Hag: She put a big laugh out of her, 
and it is what she said: "May the devil die with 
her, and it is well pleased the street will be getting 
quit of her, and it is hard say on what mountain 
she might be grazing now." 

First Hag: There will no help come burying 
her so. 

Second Hag: It is too lofty McDonough was, 
and too high-minded, bringing in a woman was 
maybe no lawful wife, or no honest child itself, 
but it might be a bychild or a tinker's brat, and 
he giving out no account of her generations or of 
her name. 

First Hag: Whether or no, she was a little 
giddy. But that is the way with McDonough. 
He is sometimes an unruly lad, but he would near 
knock you with his pride. 

Second Hag: Indeed he is no way humble, but 



McDonough's Wife 137 

looking for attendance on her, as if she was the 
youngest and the greatest in the world. 

First Hag: It is not to humour her the Union 
men will, and they carrying her to where they will 
sink her into the ground, unless it might be 
McDonough would come back, and he having 
money in his hand, to bring in some keeners and 
some hired men. 

Second Hag: He to come back at this time it is 
certain he will bring a fist-full of money. 

First Hag: What makes you say that to be 
certain? 

Second Hag: A troop of sheep-shearers that are 
on the west side of the fair, looking for hire from 
the grass farmers. I heard them laying down 
they met with McDonough at the big shearing at 
Cregroostha. 

First Hag: What day was that? 

Second Hag: This day week for the world. 

First Hag: He has time and plenty to be back 
in Gal way ere this. 

Second Hag: Great dancing they had and a 
great supper at the time the shearing was at an 
end and the fleeces lodged in the big sacks. It is 
McDonough played his music through the night- 
time. It is what I heard them saying, "He 
went out of that place weightier than he went 



in." 



First Hag: He is a great one to squeeze the 



138 McDonough's Wife 

pipes surely. There is no place ever he went into 
but he brought the whip out of it. 

Second Hag: His father was better again, they 
do be saying. It was from the other side he got 
the gift. 

First Hag: He did, and from beyond the world, 
where he befriended some in the forths of the 
Danes. It was they taught him their trade. I 
heard tell, he to throw the pipes up on top of the 
rafters, they would go sounding out tunes of them- 
selves. 

Second Hag: He could do no more with them 
than what McDonough himself can do — may ill 
luck attend him! It is inhuman tunes he does 
be making ; unnatural they are. 

First Hag: He is a great musician surely. 

Second Hag: There is no person can be safe 
from him the time he will put his " come hither " 
upon them. I give you my word he set myself 
dancing reels one time in the street, and I making 
an attack on him for keeping the little lads miching 
from school. That was a great scandal to put 
upon a decent woman. 

First Hag: He to be in the fair to-day and to 
take the fancy, you would hear the nailed boots 
of the frieze-coated man footing steps on the 
sidewalk. 

Second Hag: You would, and it 's likely he 'd 
play a notion into the skulls of the pampootied 



McDonough's Wife 139 

boys from Aran, they to be kings of France or of 
Germany, till they 'd go lift their head to the clouds 
and go knocking all before them. And the police 
it is likely laughing with themselves, as if listening 
to the talk of the blackbird would be perched upon 
a blessed bush. 

First Hag: I wonder he did not come. Could 
it be he might be made away with for the riches 
he brought from Cregroostha? It would be a 
strange thing now, he to be lying and his head 
broke, at the butt of a wall, and the woman he 
thought tho whole world of to be getting her burial 
from the workhouse. 

{A sound of pipes.) 

Second Hag: Whist, I tell you! It 's the sound 
of the pipes. It is McDonough, it is no other one. 

First Hag: {Getting up.) I 'm in dread of him 
coming in the house. He is a hasty man and 
wicked, and he vexed. What at all will he say 
and she being dead before him? Whether or no, 
it will be a sharp grief to him, she to scatter and 
to go. He might give me a backstroke and drive 
me out from the door. 

Second Hag: Let you make an attack upon 
himself before he will have time to make his own 
attack. 

McDonough: {Coming in.) Catherine ! Where 
is she? Where is Catherine? 

First Hag: Is it readying the dinner before you, 



140 McDonough' s Wife 

or wringing out a shirt for the Sunday like any- 
good slave of a wife, you are used to find your 
woman, McDonough? 

McDonough: What call would she have stop- 
ping in the house with the withered like of yourself ? 
It is not to the crabbed talk of a peevish hag a 
handsome young woman would wish to be listening 
and sport and funning being in the fair outside. 

First Hag: Go look for her in the fair so, if it 
is gadding up and down is her habit, and you being 
gone out from her sight. 

McDonough: {Shaking her.) Tell me out, 
where is she? 

First Hag: Tell out what harbour were you 
yourself in from the day you left Cregroostha? 

McDonough: Is it that she got word? — or that 
she was tired waiting for me? 

First Hag: She is gone away from you, Mc- 
Donough. 

McDonough: That is a lie, a black lie. 

First Hag: Throwing a lie in a decent woman's 
face will not bring you to the truth. 

McDonough: Is it what you are laying down 
that she went away with some other man? Say 
that out if you have courage, and I '11 wring your 
yellow windpipe. 

First Hag: Leave your hand off me and open 
the room door, and you will see am I telling you 
any lie. 



McDonough's Wife 141 

McDonough: {Goes to door, then stops.) She is 
not in it. She would have come out before me, 
and she hearing the sound of the pipes. 

First Hag: It is not the sound of the pipes 
will rouse her, or any sound made in this world at 
all. 

McDonough: {Trembling.) What is it? 

First Hag: She is gone and she is not living. 

McDonough: Is it to die she did? {Clutches her.) 

First Hag: Yesterday, and the bells ringing, 
she turned her face to the south and died away. 
It was at the hour of noon I knew and was aware 
she was gone. A great loss it to be at the time of 
the fair, and all the lodgers that would have come 
into the house. 

McDonough: It is not truth. What would 
ail her to die? 

First Hag: The makings of a child that came 
before its time, God save the mark ! She made a 
bad battle at the last. 

McDonough: What way did it fail you to send 
me out messengers seeking me when you knew her 
to be done and dying? 

First Hag: I thought she would drag another 
while. There was no time for the priest itself to 
overtake her, or to put the little dress of the Virgin 
in her hand at the last gasp of death. 

{McDonough goes into the room. He comes 
out as if affrighted, leans his head against 



142 McDonough's Wife 

the wall, and breaks into a prayer in 
Irish: "An Athair tha in Naomh, dean 
trocaire orainn! A Dia Righ an Dom- 
hain, dean trocaire orainn! A Mhuire 
M athair Dia, dean trocaire orainn! ") 

Second Hag: {Venturing near.) Do not go 
fret after her, McDonough. She could not go 
through the world forever, and travelling the 
world. It might be that trouble went with her. 

McDonough: Get out of that, you hags, you 
witches you ! You croaking birds of ill luck ! It is 
much if I will leave you in the living world, and 
you not to have held back death from her! 

Second Hag: That you may never be cross till 
you will meet with your own death! What way 
could any person do that? 

McDonough: Get out the door and it will be 
best for you! 

Second Hag: You are talking foors talk and 
giving out words that are foolishness! There is 
no one at all can put away from his road the bones 
and the thinness of death. 

McDonough: I to have been in it he would not 
have come under the lintel! Ugly as he is and 
strong, I would be able for him and would wrestle 
with him and drag him asunder and put him down ! 
Before I would let him lay his sharp touch on her 
I would break and would crush his naked ribs, 
and would burn them to lime and scatter them ! 



McDonough's Wife 143 

First Hag: Where is the use raving? It is 
best for you to turn your hand to the thing has 
to be done. 

McDonough: You to have stood in his path he 
might have brought you away in her place! That 
much would be no great thing to ask, and your 
life being dead and in ashes. 

First Hag: Quieten yourself now where it was 
the will of God. She herself made no outcry and 
no ravings. I did my best for her, laying her out 
and putting a middling white sheet around her. 
I went so far as to smoothen her hair on the two 
sides of her face. 

McDonough: (Turning to inner door.) Is it 
that you are gone from me, Catherine, you that 
were the blossom of the branch ! 

(Old woman moans.) 

It is a bad case you to have gone and to have 
left me as lonesome after you as that no one ever 
saw the like ! 

(The old woman moans after each sentence.) 

I to bring you travelling you were the best 
traveller, and the best stepper, and the best that 
ever faced the western blast, and the waves of it 
blowing from you the shawl ! I to be sore in the 
heart with walking you would make a smile of a 
laugh. I would not feel the road having your 
company ; I would walk every whole step of Ireland. 

I to bring you to the dance-house you would 



144 McDonough's Wife 

dance till you had them all tired, the same in the 
late of the day as in the commencement! Your 
steps following quick on one another the same as 
hard rain on a flagstone! They could not find 
your equal in all Ireland or in the whole ring of 
Connemara ! 

What way did it fail me to see the withering of 
the branches on every bush, as it is certain they 
withered the time laughter died with your laugh? 
The cold of winter has settled on the hearth. My 
heart is closed up with trouble ! 

First Hag: It is best for us shut the door and to 
keep out the noises of the fair. 

McDonough: Ah, what sort at all are the people 
of the fair, to be doing their bargaining and clutch- 
ing after their luckpenny, and she being stark 
and quiet ! 

First Hag: She has to be buried ere evening. 
There was a messenger of a clerk came laying that 
down. 

McDonough: May ill luck attend him! Is it 
that he thinks she that is gone has no person be- 
longing to her to wake her through the night- 
time? 

First Hag: He sent his men to coffin her. She 
will be brought away in the heel of the day. 

McDonough: It is a great wake I will give her. 
It would not be for honour she to go without that 
much. Cakes and candles and drink and tobacco! 



McDonough's Wife 145 

The table of this house is too narrow. It is from 
the neighbours we should borrow tables. 

First Hag: That cannot be. It is what the 
man said, " This is a common lodging-house. It 
is right to banish the dead from the living." He 
has the law with him, and custom. There is no 
use you thinking to go outside of that. 

McDonough: My lasting grief it will be I not 
to get leave to show her that respect ! 

First Hag: " There will a car be sent," he said, 
' ' and two boys from the Union for to bear her out 
from the house." 

McDonough: Men from the Union, are you 
saying? I would not give leave to one of them to 
put a hand anigh or anear her ! It is not their car 
will bring her to the grave. That would be the 
most pity in the world ! 

First Hag: You have no other way to bring 
her on her road. It is best for you give in to their 
say. 

McDonough: Where are the friends and the 
neighbours that they would not put a hand under 
her? 

First Hag: They are after making their refusal. 
She was not well liked in Galway. There is no 
one will come to her help. 

McDonough: Is that truth, or is it lies you have 
made up for my tormenting? 

First Hag: It is no lie at all. It is as sure as 



146 McDonough' s Wife 

the winter's frost. You have no one to draw to 
but yourself. 

McDonough: It is mad jealous the women of 
Galway were and wild with anger, and she coming 
among them, that was seventeen times better than 
their best! My bitter grief I ever to have come 
next or near them, or to have made music for the 
lugs or for the feet of wide crooked hags! That 
they may dance to their death to the devil's pipes 
and be the disgrace of the world! It is a great 
slur on Ireland and a great scandal they to have 
made that refusing! That the Corrib River may 
leave its merings and rise up out of its banks till 
the waves will rise like mountains over the town 
and smother it, with all that is left of its tribes ! 

First Hag: Be whist now, or they will be angered 
and they hearing you outside in the fair. 

McDonough: Let their day not thrive with the 
buyers and the sellers in the fair! The curse of 
mildew on the tillage men, that every grain of 
seed they have sowed may be rotten in the ridges, 
and the grass corn blasted from the east before 
the latter end of harvest ! The curse of the dead 
on the herds driving cattle and following after 
markets and fairs! My own curse on the big 
farmers slapping and spitting in their deal ! That 
a blood murrain may fall upon their bullocks! 
That rot may fall upon their flocks and maggots 
make them their pasture and their prey between 



McDonough's Wife 147 

this and the great feast of Christmas! It is my 
grief every hand in the fair not to be set shaking 
and be crookened, where they were not stretched 
out in friendship to the fair-haired woman that is 
left her lone within boards ! 

Second Hag: {At door.) Is it a niggard you 
are grown to be, McDonough, and you with riches 
in your hand? Is it against a new wedding you 
are keeping your pocket stiff, or to buy a house 
and an estate, that it fails you to call in hired 
women to make a right keening, and a few decent 
boys to lift her through the streets? 

McDonough: I to have money or means in my 
hand, I would ask no help or be beholden to any 
one at all. 

Second Hag: If you had means, is it? I heard 
by true telling that you have money and means. 
"At the sheep-shearers' dance a high lady held 
the plate for the piper; a sovereign she put in it 
out of her hand, and there was no one of the big 
gentry but followed her. There never was seen 
so much riches in any hall or home." Where 
now is the fifty gold sovereigns you brought away 
from Cregroostha? 

McDonough: Where is it? 

Second Hag: Is it that you would begrudge it 
to the woman is inside? 

McDonough: You know well I would not 
begrudge it. 



148 McDonough's Wife 

First Hag: A queer thing you to speak so stiff 
and to be running down all around you, and your 
own pocket being bulky the while. 

McDonough: (Turning out pocket.) It is as 
slack and as empty as when I went out from this. 

Second Hag: You could not have run through 
that much. 

McDonough: Not a red halfpenny left, or so 
much as the image of a farthing. 

First Hag: Is it robbed and plundered you 
were, and you walking the road? 

McDonough: (Sitting down and rocking him- 
self.) I wish to my God it was some robber 
stripped and left me bare ! Robbed and plundered ! 
I was that, and by the worst man and the unkindest 
that ever was joined to a woman or lost a woman, 
and that is myself. 

First Hag: Is it to lose it unknownst you did? 

McDonough: What way did I lose it, is it? 
I lost it knowingly and of my own will. Thrown 
on counters, thrown on the drink-house floor, 
given for spirits, given for porter, thrown for 
drink for friends and acquaintances, for strangers 
and strollers and vagabonds. Scattered in the 
parish of Ardrahan and at Labane cross. Tramps 
and schemers lying drunk and dead drunk at the 
butt of every wall. (Buries head in his hands.) 

First Hag: That is what happened the gold 
yourself and the pipes had won? You made no 



McDonough's Wife 149 

delay doing that much. You have a great wrong 
done to the woman inside, where you left her 
burying bare. 

Second Hag: She to be without a farthing 
dip for her corpse, and you after lavishing 
gold. 

First Hag: You have a right to bruise your 
knees making repentance, you that lay on the one 
pillow with her. You to be putting curses upon 
others and making attacks on them! I would 
make no complaint, you to be naked at your own 
burying and at the very hour of death, and the 
rain falling down on your head. 

McDonough: Little I mind what happens me. 
There is no word you can put out of your mouth 
can do me any injury at all. Oh, Catherine, it is 
best for me go hang myself out of a tree, and my 
carcass to be torn by savage dogs that went fam- 
ished through a great length of time, and my bones 
left without a token or a flag or a headstone, and 
my name that was up at one time to be forgotten 
out of mind! (He bursts out sobbing.) 

First Hag: The shadows should be lengthening 
in the street. Look out would you see the car to 
be coming. 

Second Hag: It was a while ago at the far 
corner of the fair. They were but waiting for the 
throng to lessen. 

First Hag: They are making too much delay. 



150 McDonough's Wife 

Second Hag: I see a hint of the livery of the 
poorhouse coming through the crowd. 

First Hag: The men of the Union are coming 
to bring her away, McDonough. There is nothing 
more to be done. She will get her burial from the 
rates. 

McDonough: Oh, Catherine, Catherine! Is it 
I myself have brought you to that shame and that 
disgrace ! 

Second Hag: You are making too much of it. 
Little it will signify, and we to be making clay, 
who was it dug a hole through the nettles or lifted 
down the sods over our head. 

First Hag: That is so. What signifies she to 
be followed or to be going her lone, and her eyes 
being shut to the world? 

McDonough: Is that the thought ye have 
within ye, ye Gal way hags? It is easy known it 
is in a trader's town you were bred, and in a street 
among dealers. 

First Hag: I was but saying it does not 
signify. 

McDonough: But I say it does signify! I will 
tell that out to you and the world! That might 
be the thought of a townsman or a trader, or a 
rich merchant itself that had his estate gained by 
trafficking, for that is a sort does be thinking more 
of what they can make out of the living than of 
keeping a good memory of the dead ! 



McDonough's Wife 151 

First Hag: There are worthier men than 
yourself, maybe, in storehouses and in shops. 

McDonough: But I am of the generations of 
Orpheus, and have in me the breed of his master! 
And of Raftery and Carolan and O'Daly and all 
that made sounds of music from this back to the 
foundations of the earth! And as to the rich of 
the world, I would not humble my head to them. 
Let them have their serving men and their labour- 
ers and messengers will do their bidding. But the 
servant I myself command is the pipes that draws 
its breath from the four winds, and from a wind 
is beyond them again, and at the back of the winds 
of the air. She was a wedded woman and a woman 
having my own gold ring on her hand, and my 
own name put down with hers in the book. But 
she tc have been a shameless woman as ye make 
her out to be, and sold from tinker to tinker on the 
road it is all one! I will show Gal way and the 
world that it does signify; that it is not fitting 
McDonough's wife to travel without company 
and good hands under her and good following on 
the road. Play now, pipes, if you never played 
before! Call to the keeners to follow her with 
screams and beating of the hands and calling out! 
Set them crying now with your sound and with 
your notes, as it is often you brought them to the 
dance-house ! (Goes out and plays a lament outside.) 
First Hag: (Looking out.) It is queer and 



152 McDonough's Wife 

wild he is, cutting his teeth and the hair standing 
on him. 

Second Hag: Some high notion he has, calling 
them to show honour to her as if she was the 
Queen of the Angels. 

First Hag: To draw to silence the whole fair 
did. Every person is moving towards this house. 
{A murmur as of people. McDonough comes 
in, stands at door, looking out.) 

McDonough: I squeeze the pipes as a challenge 
to the whole of the fair, gentle noble and simple, 
the poor and the high up. Come hither and cry 
Catherine McDonough, give a hand to carry her 
to the grave ! Come to her aid, tribes of Gal way , 
Lynches and Blakes and Frenches ! McDonough's 
pipes give you that command, that have learned 
the lamentation of the Danes. 

Come follow her on the road, trades of Galway, 
the fishermen, and the carpenters, and the weavers ! 
It is by no short road we will carry her that never 
will walk any road from this out! By Williams- 
gate, beside Lynch's gallows, beside the gaol of 
the hangings, the salmon will make their leap as 
we pass ! 

Men at Door: We will. We will follow her, 
McDonough. 

Others: Give us the first place. 

Others: We ourselves will carry her ! 

McDonough: Faith, Catherine, you have your 



McDonough's Wife 153 

share and your choice this day of fine men, 
asking to carry you and to lend you their 
strength. 

I will give no leave to traffickers to put their 
shoulder under you, or to any that made a refusal, 
or any seaside man at all. 

I will give leave to no one but the sheep-shearers 
from Eserkelly, from Moneen and Cahirlinny and 
the whole stretch of Cregroostha. It is they have 
friendship for music, it is they have a wish for my 
four bones. 

{Sheep-shearers come in. They are dressed 
in white flannel. Each has a pair of 
shears at his side. The first carries a 
crook.) 

First Sheep-shearer: Is it within there she is, 
McDonough? 

First Hag: Go in through the door. The boards 
are around her and a clean quilt over them. Have 
a care not to leave down your hands on it, and 
they maybe being soiled with the fair. 

{They take off their hats and go in.) 

McDonough: {Turning to her door.) If you 
got no great honour from your birth up, and went 
barefoot through the first of your youth, you will 
get great respect now and will be remembered in 
the times to come. 

There is many a lady dragging silk skirts 
through the lawns and the flower knots of Con- 



154 McDonough's Wife 

nacht, will get no such grand gathering of people 
at the last as you are getting on this day. 

It is the story of the burying of McDonough's 
wife will be written in the book of the people ! 

{Sheep-shearers appear at inner door. Mc~ 
Donough goes out, squeezing the pipes. 
Triumphant music is heard from out- 
side.) 

Curtain 



NOTES 

THE BOGIE MEN 

A message sent to America from Dublin that our 
Theatre had been "driven out with hisses " ; an answer- 
ing message from New York that the Playboy, the 
cause of battle, was now "as dead as a doornail," set 
me musing with renewed delight on our incorrigible 
genius for myth-making, the faculty that makes our 
traditional history a perpetual joy, because it is, like 
the Sidhe, an eternal Shape-changer. 

At Philadelphia, the city of trees, where in spite of 
a day in the police court and before a judge, and the 
arrest of our players at the suit not of a Puritan but 
a publican, and the throwing of currant cake with 
intent to injure, I received very great personal kind- 
ness, a story of his childhood told by my host gave me 
a fable on which to hang my musings ; and the Dublin 
enthusiast and the American enthusiast who inter- 
changed so many compliments and made so brave a 
show to one another, became Dermot and Timothy, 
"two harmless drifty lads," the Bogie Men of my little 
play. They were to have been vagrants, tatterde- 
malions, but I needed some dress the change of which 
would change their whole appearance in a moment, 
and there came to mind the chimney sweepers of my 
childhood. 

i55 



15^ 



Notes 



They used to come trotting the five miles from 
Loughrea, little fellows with blue eyes shining out 
from soot-black faces, wearing little soot-coloured 
smocks. Our old doctor told us he had gone to see 
one of them who was sick, and had found him lying in 
a box, with soot up to his chin as bedding and blanket. 

Not many years ago a decent looking man came to 
my door, with I forget what request. He told me he 
had heard of ghosts and fairies, but had never met 
with anything worse than himself, but that he had 
had one great fright in his lifetime. Its cause had 
been the squealing and outcry made by two rats 
caught in one trap, that had come clattering down a 
flight of steps one time when he was a little lad, and 
had come sweeping chimneys to Roxborough. 

AIR OF "ALL AROUND MY HAT I WILL WEAR A 
GREEN RIBBON!" 




THE FULL MOON 

It had sometimes preyed on my mind that Hyacinth 
Halvey had been left by me in Cloon for his lifetime, 
bearing the weight of a character that had been put on 
him by force. But it failed me to release him by 
reason, that "binds men to the wheel"; it took the 



Notes 



157 



call of some of those unruly ones who give in to no 
limitations, and dance to the sound of music that is 
outside this world, to bring him out from "roast and 
boiled and all the comforts of the day." Where he 
is now I do not know, but anyway he is free. 

Tannian's dog has now become a protagonist; and 
Bartley Fallon and Shawn Early strayed in from the 
fair green of Spreading the News, and Mrs. Broderick 
from the little shop where The Jackdaw hops on the 
counter, as witnesses to the miracle that happened in 
Hyacinth's own inside; and it is likely they may be 
talking of it yet ; for the talks of Cloon are long talks, 
and the histories told there do not lessen or fail. 

As to Davideen's song, I give the air of it below. 
The Queen Anne in it was no English queen, but, as 
I think, that Aine of the old gods at whose hill mad 
dogs were used to gather, and who turned to grey the 
yellow hair of Finn of the Fianna of Ireland. It is 
with some thought of her in their mind that the 
history-tellers say "Anne was not fair like the Georges 
but very bad and a tyrant. She tyrannised over the 
Irish. She was very wicked ; oh ! very wicked indeed ! ' ' 

AIR OF " THE HEATHER BROOM!" 






J^kdzU 



^-j^T^S 



I jU-J-j^trr^^ 



] I 1 =F 



-* — J- 



=£ 



Pi 



158 Notes 

COATS 

I find some bald little notes I made before writing 
Coats. "Hazel is astonished Mineog can take such 
a thing to heart, but it is quite different when he 
himself is offended." "The quarrel is so violent you 
think it can never be healed, but the ordinary cir- 
cumstances of life force reconciliation. They are 
the most powerful force of all." And then a quota- 
tion from Nietzsche, "A good war justifies every 



cause." 



DAMER'S GOLD 

In a lecture I gave last year on playwriting I said 
I had been forced to write comedy because it was 
wanted for our theatre, to put on at the end of the 
verse plays, but that I think tragedy is easier. For, 
I said, tragedy shows humanity in the grip of cir- 
cumstance, of fate, of what our people call "the thing 
will happen," "the Woman in the Stars that does all." 
There is a woman in the stars they say, who is always 
hurting herself in one way or other, and according to 
what she is doing at the hour of your birth, so will it 
happen to you in your lifetime, whether she is hanging 
herself or drowning herself or burning herself in the 
fire. "And," said an old man who was telling me this, 
" I am thinking she was doing a great deal of acting at 
the time I myself made my start in the world." Well, 
you put your actor in the grip of this woman, in the 
claws of the cat. Once in that grip you know what the 
end must be. You may let your hero kick or struggle, 



Notes 159 

but he is in the claws all the time, it is a mere question 
as to how nearly you will let him escape, and when you 
will allow the pounce. Fate itself is the protagonist, 
your actor cannot carry much character, it is out of 
place. You do not want to know the character of a 
wrestler you see trying his strength at a show. 

In writing a little tragedy, The Gaol Gate, I made 
the scenario in three lines, "He is an informer; he is 
dead; he is hanged." I wrote that play very quickly. 
My two poor women were in the clutch of the Woman 
in the Stars. ... I knew what I was going to do and 
I was able to keep within those three lines. But in 
comedy it is different. Character comes in, and why 
it is so I cannot explain, but as soon as one creates a 
character, he begins to put out little feet of his own 
and take his own way. 

I had been meditating for a long time past on the 
mass of advice that is given one by friends and well- 
wishers and relations, advice that would be excellent 
if the giver were not ignorant so often of the one 
essential in the case, the one thing that matters. 
But there is usually something out of sight, of which 
the adviser is unaware, it may be something half 
mischievously hidden from him, it may be that "secret 
of the heart with God" that is called religion. In 
the whole course of our work at the theatre we have 
been I may say drenched with advice by friendly 
people who for years gave us the reasons why we did 
not succeed. . . . All their advice, or at least some of 
it, might have been good if we had wanted to make 
money, to make a common place of amusement. Our 



160 Notes 

advisers did not see that what we wanted was to 
create for Ireland a theatre with a base of realism, 
with an apex of beauty. Well, last summer I made a 
fable for this meditation, this emotion, at the back of 
my mind to drive. 

I pictured to myself, for I usually first see a play 
as a picture, a young man, a mere lad, very sleepy in 
the daytime. He was surrounded by people kind 
and wise, who lamented over his rags and idleness 
and assured him that if he did n't get up early and 
do his work in the daytime he would never know the 
feel of money in his hand. He listens to all their 
advice, but he does not take it, because he knows what 
they do not know, that it is in the night time precisely 
he is filling his pocket, in the night when, as I think, we 
receive gifts from the unseen. I placed him in the 
house of a miser, an old man who had saved a store 
of gold. I called the old man Darner, from a folk- 
story of a chandler who had bought for a song the 
kegs of gold the Danes had covered with tallow as a 
disguise when they were driven out of Ireland, and 
who had been rich and a miser ever after. I did not 
mean this old man, Darner, to appear at all. He was to 
be as invisible as that Heaven of which we are told 
the violent take it by force. My intention at first 
was that he should be robbed, but then I saw robbery 
would take too much sympathy from my young lad, 
and I decided the money should be won by the lesser 
sin of cardplaying, but still behind the scenes. Then 
I thought it would have a good stage effect if old 
Darner could just walk once across the stage in the 



Notes 161 

background. His relations might have come into 
the house to try and make themselves agreeable to 
him, and he would appear and they would vanish. 
. . . Darner comes in, and contrary to my intention, 
he begins to find a tongue of his own. He has made 
his start in the world, and has more than a word to 
say. How that play will work out I cannot be sure, 
or if it will ever be finished at all. But if ever it is 
I am quite sure it will go as Darner wants, not as I 
want. 

That is what I said last winter, and now in harvest 
time the play is all but out of my hands. But as I 
foretold, Darner has taken possession of it, turning it 
to be as simple as a folk-tale, where the innocent of 
the world confound the wisdom of the wise. The idea 
with which I set out has not indeed quite vanished, 
but is as if "extinct and pale; not darkness, but light 
that has become dead." 

As to Darner's changes of mood, it happened a little 
time ago, when the play was roughly written, but on 
its present lines, that I took up a volume of Montaigne, 
and found in it his justification by high examples : 

"Verilie it is not want but rather plentie that 
causeth avarice. I will speake of mine owne experi- 
ence concerning this subject. I have lived in three 
kinds of condition since I came out of my infancie. 
The first time, which continued well nigh twentie 
yeares, I have past it over as one who had no other 
means but casual without any certaine maintenance 
or regular prescription. My expenses were so much 



1 62 Notes 

the more carelessly laid out and lavishly employed, 
by how much more they wholly depended on fortunes 
rashnesse and exhibition. I never lived so well at 
ease. . . . My second manner of life hath been to 
have monie: which when I had once fingred, according 
to my condition I sought to hoorde up some against 
a rainy day. . . . My minde was ever on my halfe- 
penny; my thoughts ever that way. Of commoditie 
I had little or nothing. . . . And after you are once 
accustomed, and have fixed your thoughts upon a 
heape of monie, it is no longer at your service; you 
dare not diminish it; it is a building which if you 
touch or take any part from it, you will think it will 
all fall. And I should sooner pawne my clothes or 
sell a horse, with lesse care and compulsion than make 
a breach into that beloved purse which I kept in 
store. ... I was some yeares of the same humour: 
I wot not what good Demon did most profitably 
remove me from it, like to the Siracusan, and made me 
to neglect my sparing. ... I live from hand to 
mouth, from day to day, and have I but to supplie 
my present and ordinarie needs I am satisfied. . . . 
And I singularly gratifie myself this correction came 
upon me in an age naturally inclined to covetousnesse, 
and that I am free from that folly so common and 
peculiar to old men, and the most ridiculous of all 
humane follies. Feraulez who had passed through 
both fortunes and found that encrease of goods was 
no encrease of appetite to eat, to sleepe or to embrace 
his wife ; and who on the other side felt heavily on his 
shoulders the importunitie of ordering and directing 



Notes 163 

his Oeconomicall affairs as it doth on mine, deter- 
mined with himselfe to content a poore young man, 
his faithfull friend, greedily gaping after riches, and 
frankly made him a present donation of all his great 
and excessive riches, always provided hee should 
undertake to entertaine and find him, honestly and 
in good sort, as his guest and friend. In which 
estate they lived afterwards most happily and mu- 
tually content with the change of their condition." 
And so I hope it may come to pass with the re- 
maining years of Simon and of Darner. 

McDONOUGH'S WIFE 

In my childhood there was every year at my old 
home, Roxborough, or, as it is called in Irish, Cre- 
groostha, a great sheep-shearing that lasted many days. 
On the last evening there was always a dance for the 
shearers and their helpers, and two pipers used to 
sit on chairs placed on a corn-bin to make music for 
the dance. One of them was always McDonough. 
He was the best of all the wandering pipers who went 
about from house to house. When, at my marriage, 
I moved from the barony of Dunkellin to the neigh- 
bouring barony of Kiltartan, he came and played at 
the dance given to the tenants in my honour, and he 
came and played also at my son's coming of age. 
Not long after that he died. The last time I saw him 
he came to ask for a loan of money to take the train 
to Ennis, where there was some fair or gathering of 
people going on, and I would not lend to so old a friend, 



164 Notes 

but gave him a half-sovereign, and we parted with 
kindly words. He was so great a piper that in the 
few years since his death myths have already begun 
to gather around him. I have been told that his 
father was taken into a hill of the Danes, the Tuatha 
de Danaan, the ancient invisible race, and they had 
taught him all their tunes and so bewitched his pipes 
that they would play of themselves if he threw them 
up on the rafters. McDonough's pipes, they say, 
had not that gift, but he himself could play those 
inspired tunes. Lately I was told the story I have 
used in this play about his taking away fifty sovereigns 
from the shearing at Cregroostha and spending them 
at a village near. "I said to him," said the old man 
who told me this, "that it would be better for him 
to have bought a good kitchen of bacon; but he said, 
'Ah, when I want more, I have but to squeeze the 
pipes." ' The story of his wife's death and burial 
as I give it has been told to me here and there. That 
is my fable, and the emotion disclosed by the story is, 
I think, the lasting pride of the artist of all ages: 

"We are the music makers 
And we are the dreamers of dreams. . . . 
We in the ages lying 
In the buried past of the earth 
Built Nineveh with our sighing, 
And Babel itself with our mirth." 

I wrote the little play while crossing the Atlantic 
in the Cymric last September. Since it was written 



Notes 



165 



I have been told at Kin vara that "McDonough was 
a proud man ; he never would go to a wedding unasked, 
and he never would play through a town." So he had 
laid down pride for pride's sake, at that time of the 
burying of his wife. 

In Galway this summer one who was with him at 
the end told me he had a happy death, "But he died 
poor ; for what he would make in the long nights he 
would spend through the summer days." And then 
she said, "Himself and Reilly and three other fine 
pipers died within that year. There was surely a 
feast of music going on in some other place." 

Dates of production of plays. 

The Bogie Men was first produced at the Court 
Theatre, London, July 8, 1912, with the following 
cast : 



Taig O'Harragha 
Darby Melody 



J. M. Kerrigan 
J. A. O'Rourke 



The Full Moon was first produced at the Abbey 
Theatre, Dublin, on November 10, 19 10, with the 
following cast: 
Shawn Early . . . -J- O'Rourke 



Bartley Fallon 
Peter Tannian 
Hyacinth Halvey 
Mrs. Broderick 
Miss Joyce . 
Cracked Mary 
Davideen 



Arthur Sinclair 

Sidney Morgan 

Fred. 0' Donovan 

. Sara Allgood 

Eileen O'Doherty 

Maire O'Neill 

. J. M. Kerrigan 



1 66 



Notes 



Coats was first produced at the Abbey Theatre, 
Dublin, December, 1910, with the following cast: 



Mineog 
Hazel . 
John 



Arthur Sinclair 
J. M. Kerrigan 
J. A. O'Rourke 



Damer's Gold was first produced at the Abbey 
Theatre November 21, 1912, with the following cast: 



Delia Hessian 
Staff y Kirwan 
Ralph Hessian 
Darner 
Simon Niland 



. Sara Allgood 
Sidney Morgan 
J. M. Kerrigan 

Arthur Sinclair 
A. Wright 



McDonough 's Wife has not yet been produced by 
the Abbey Company. 



Jl Selection from the 
Catalogue of 

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 



Complete Catalogue sent 
on application 



Irish Folk-History Plays 

By 
LADY GREGORY 

First Series, The Tragedies 
GRANIA KINCORA DERVORGILLA 

Second Series. The Tragic Comedies 

THE CANAVANS THE WHITE COCKADE 

THE DELIVERER 

2 vols. Each, $1.50 net. By mail, $1.65 

Lady Gregory has preferred going for her material to the tra- 
ditional folk-history rather than to the authorized printed versions, 
and she has been able, in so doing, to make her plays more living. 
One of these, K'tncora, telling of Brian Boru, who reigned in the 
year iooo, evoked such keen local interest that an old farmer 
travelled from the neighborhood of Kincora to see it acted in 
Dublin. 

The story of Grania. on which Lady Gregory has founded one 
of these plays, was taken entirely from tradition. Grania was a 
beautiful young woman and was to have been married to Finn, the 
great leader of the Fenians; but before the marriage, she went 
away from the bridegroom with his handsome young kinsman, 
Diarmuid. After many years, when Diarmuid had died (and Finn 
had a hand in his death), she went back to Finn and became his 
queen. 

Another of Lady Gregory's plays, The Canavans dealt with 
the stormy times of Queen Elizabeth, whose memory is a horror in 
Ireland second only to that of Cromwell. 

The White Cockade is founded on a tradition of King James 
having escaped from Ireland after the battle of the Boyne in a wine 
barrel. 

The choice of folk history rather than written history gives a 
freshness of treatment and elasticity of material which made the 
late J. M. Synge say that " Lady Gregory's method had brought 
back the possibility of writing historic plays." 

All these plays, except Grania, which has not yet been staged, 
have been very successfully performed in Ireland. They are written 
in the dialect of Kiltartan, which had already become familiar to 
readers of Lady Gregory's books. 



G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

NEW YORK LONDON 



Irish Folk-History Plays 

By 

LADY GREGORY 

Lady Gregory's plays " never fail to do the one thing 
which we all demand from a play, which is not, as stupid 
people say, to amuse us (though Lady Gregory's plays 
are extremely amusing) , but to take us out of ourselves 
and out of London and out of the stuffy theater while we 
are listening to them." — George Bernard Shaw. 

"Among the three great exponents of the modern Celtic 
movement in Ireland, Lady Gregory holds an unusual 
place. It is she from whom came the chief historical im- 
pulse which resulted in the re-creation for the present 
generation of the elemental poetry of early Ireland, its 
wild disorders, its loves and hates — all the passionate 
light and shadow of that fierce and splendid race. 
. . . Should be read by all those who are interested in 
this most unusual literary movement of modern times. 
Indeed they furnish a necessary complement to the over- 
fanciful pictures drawn by Mr. Yeats of the dim morning 
of Celtic Song." — Springfield Republican. 

"Lady Gregory has kept alive the tradition of Ireland 
as a laughing country. She surpasses the others in the 
quality of her comedy, however, not that she is more 
comic, but that she is more comprehensively true to life. 
Lady Gregory has gone to reality as to a cave of treasure. 
She is one of the discoverers of Ireland. Her genius, like 
Synge's, seems to have opened its eyes one day and seen 
spread below it the immense sea of Irish common speech, 
with its color, its laughter, and its music." — Nation. 



G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

NEW YORK LONDON 



The Nun of Kent 



Dramas of Importance 

Plays 

The Silver Box— Joy— Strife 

By John Galsworthy 

Author of " The Country House," etc. 
Grown 8vo. $1 .35 net 

" By common consent, London has witnessed this week 
a play of serious importance, not approached by any other 
book or drama of the season, John Galsworthy's 'The 
Strife.' It is regarded not merely as a remarkable social 
document of significance, but as a creation which, while of 
the most modern realism, is yet classic in its pronounced 
art and exalted philosophy. The play shows the types of 
the strongest men # as victims of comical events and of 
weaker men. It will be produced in America, where, on 
account of its realistic treatment of the subject of labor 
union, it is sure to be a sensation." — Special cable dispatch 
to N. Y. Times. 

A 

Drama 
By Grace Denio Litchfield 

Author of "Baldur the Beautiful," etc. 
Crown 8 vo. $ 1 .00 net 

" In this drama the pure essentials of dramatic writing 
are rarely blended. # . . . The foundation for the stirring 
play is a pathetic episode given in Froude's Henry VIII. . . . 

" The lines of the poem, while full of thought, are also 
characterized by fervor and beauty. The strength of the 
play is centred upon a few characters. . . . ' The Nun 
of Kent ' may be described as a fascinating dramatic 
story." — Baltimore News. 

Yzdra 

A Tragedy in Three Acts 

By Louis V. Ledoux 

Crown 8vo, Cloth. $1.25 net 

" There are both grace and strength in this drama and 
it also possesses the movement and spirit needed for pres- 
entation upon the stage. Some of the figures used are 
striking and beautiful, quite free from excess, and some- 
times almost austere in their restraint. The characters 
are clearly individualized and a just balance is preserved 
in the action." — The Outlook, New York. 

New York G. P. Putnam's Sons London 



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